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Why look for an index?
Well... hopefully someone else has done the hard work of looking through zillions of search results and identifying journals that actually exist, and that can be contacted if necessary.
Let's see. An exact search on "world index of journals" should narrow things down.
Here's what we get:
Google: "No results..." but then there are about 264,000,000 results that are not exact.
No bad. I won't start at the bottom of that list!
The Index Copernicus , based in Warsaw, is at top.
After that there are some journal ranking sites. And some incomplete journal indexing sites that seem to have started and then stopped.
"World list of journals" doesn't lead far either. There is a Wikipedia entry that lists some journals. And a Google snippit highlights this revelation:
"No one knows how many scientific journals there are, but several estimates point to around 30,000, with close to two million articles published each year."
That came from a short and pithy article:
"Too much academic research is being published"
T here is probably not much more I need to say.
It helps keep us on our toes. We wouldn't need science if we actually knew everything.
Even specialists have difficulty learning and remembering all the specific technical terms used in their field. Oxford University Press and other publishers in the past published many discipline-specific dictionaries and glossaries. Now we can find open-access technical glossaries online. Here are some good examples.
Biology terms
Biology Dictionary , USA
Botanical terms
Florabase glossary, Western Australia
This year, 2020, may be the year that online teaching "comes of age", as a matter of necessity following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in 2019 (agent of the COVID19 disease).
This means many teachers are busy compiling new course materials for online distribution. Here I will add a few links that may be useful. I won't attempt to be comprehensive, nor will I review each item.
Please join our " science communication " group to tell others about any online teaching resources (and methods) that you find useful.
General
UNESCO - distance learning solutions (links for all education levels).
Biology
University of California at Berkeley - Welcome to Evolution 101
A research job are one thing, a grant is another -- or maybe not?
Navigating the the world of research funding is one of the job skills that most researchers need. Employers often explicitly look at fund-raising ability and history when seeking new staff.
Here is a possible starting point for the study of grants and funding (more will be added as time permits):
Grantome
"The mission of Grantome is to use data to drive discovery of new knowledge about scientific research grants." (Grantome website, 27th June, 2020)
Tools for many different areas of biological research (genetics, ecology, medicine, and more). See:
Recently I was asked to fill out a poll (at http://www.easypolls.net ) on my use of social networks, by a Yahoo group that is focused on Crop Wild Relatives (CWR). I mainly use ResearchGate, which put me in the "other" category in the options offered.
There are many kinds of online polling service available, and I regard them as an important part of the online ecosystem, for academia as much as they are for commercial or entertainment purposes.
Readers of this blog: Please recommend any polling services you think may be useful for research surveys or other academic purposes.
Vuong (2019) has described a site that aims to improve "the weakest link in the chain of scientific knowledge production", namely the peer review process employed by academic journals.
The site URL is https://scirev.org
Here authors can register to provide their own evaluations of scientific journals they have submitted papers to, so that an author-led rating of journal quality can emerge, based primarily on experiences by authors of the peer-review process.
I recommend reading Vuong's full article, and visiting the SciRev to make your own contribution to assessing the journals you have had experience with.
Q.-H. Vuong (2019) SciRev: an initiative for improving peer review transparancy. European Science Editing 45(1) 20.
Not academic, but possibly of interest to many, is the BBC Learning English website page a
http://bbc.co.uk/learningenglish
At the top of the site, there is a language selection button.
Navigation through the courses and lessons is provided in several languages.