Scientific Literature Searching is a Disaster Today

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Scientific Literature Searching is a Disaster Today
Prof. Rick Reis

The posting below looks at some critical issues related to accessing scientific articles, particularly older ones that can provide important reference points for further research.  It is by biologist Frank Heppner (birdman@uri.edu). ©2016 Frank Heppner. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
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Tomorrow’s Research

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                                      Scientific Literature Searching is a Disaster Today


My first scientific publication came out in 1964 when I was a Master’s candidate. I still remember the pleasure when my package of 300 reprints arrived, at a cost that was well within the budget of my $2,400 a year salary as a teaching assistant. When the reprint requests started to come in from some of the Big Names in the field I tried not to let my head swell as I signed each, “Cordially yours, Frank Heppner.”

Over the ensuing 51 years, I published regularly in the whole spectrum of journals, from Science, Nature, and PNAS, to the Mindanao Journal of Science Teaching. My last paper before my retirement in 2010 was a 2009 review article about organized flight in birds in Animal Behavior that I coauthored with a young friend from Slovenia named Iztok Lebar Bajec. I did the literature search in the old-fashioned way; lots of time in the library, and boxes of copies and reprints. After that, sayonara scientific publishing.

Late last year however, I had reason to do a scientific literature search again, and my, my, how things had changed. My university office was long closed, so I started searching online from home. I had always “sort of” liked Google Scholar as a first-order search engine, because it was multidisciplinary, and very easy to use. Find an article, find the list of citations, call up the citations, and repeat the process. Not perfect, not complete, but very fast.

So, coffee cup in hand, I settled down, called up Google Scholar and began. Enter my search terms, and here’s a nice list of references. Click on one, and presto! For $35 Elsevier will let me look at the article. Forget that. Tried a couple of other articles and on-line search engines. Same story. No payee, no lookie. So then I figured (although the System didn’t tell me so) that if I accessed the net using my university library password (which I had providentially kept active), it might be different.

I logged on to the library website, and lo and behold. I still couldn’t get access to articles in most contemporary journals. Time to call the reference librarian. I found out that if I wanted to look at articles using one of the university’s on-campus computers, I’d have “access rights” to these journals, but if I wanted to use a remote (off-campus computer) I’d have to get an additional password. Or, fork over big wads of cash. Grumble. Grumble. But-- okay, I signed up. What on earth do people without an institutional affiliation do? Or what if your institution can’t afford subscriptions to the big publications?

I got back on line at home and discovered new wonders like Scopus, Research Gate, and Web of Science. So I tried out Scopus and just out of curiosity found Iztok and my 2009 paper without much difficulty. It had about 125 references. I decided to see how easy it was to find the papers we had cited in this paper in the Scopus version of the whole paper. Cited papers written within the previous 10 years did not present many problems. They had a DOI number, which was, in theory, a direct link to the cited paper. It worked about 90% of the time, but at times required three or four links to arrive at the paper. The balance were dead links, or did not actually lead to the article for some reason. A large number of the remaining cited articles, which didn’t have DOI numbers, but did have links, could not be reached by clicking on the links in the citation–no idea why. What about papers that didn’t have links at all, usually older ones? You had to cut-and-paste the citation, copy it to a notepad, and then go back to the Scopus homepage and do a search.

Just to try a little experiment, I entered my name in various formats in the “Author” Scopus search space. “Heppner F H” had 297 listed articles, most not mine, but from a neurobiologist in Switzerland who was actually F L Heppner. “Heppner FH” had none. What a difference a space makes. “Heppner F.” had 285. “Heppner F.H. had 6 (all mine), “Heppner Frank” had 13 (only one mine), and Heppner Frank H.” had one (that was also mine). My, what a fussy little thing this Scopus is. I actually had about 40 papers in science that should have been picked up. I tried Google Scholar to see if it gave variable results too. “Heppner FH” yielded 17 hits, but “Heppner Frank” produced 34, more or less the reverse of Scopus. So it was not just what you enter in a search box, but how you say it that determines how complete your search is. Google Scholar seemed to be a bit less fussy.

Read the rest at:  https://tomprof.stanford.edu/