From Library Journal, Duplication Is Ubiquitous–Online Databases
By Carol Tenopir — 4/1/2005
Google Scholar is good at uncovering multiple versions of the same (or nearly the same) scholarly article or just multiple places for the same version. For example, for one astronomy article on “brown dwarfs,” Google Scholar offered me the choice of the final published version in Astrophysical Journal on the publisher’s password-protected e-journal system, a free PDF e-print from arXiv.org, and a PDF on an author’s web site.
Duplication is a fact of library life. Metasearch engines, link resolvers, and Google Scholar are revealing multiple sources and sometimes multiple versions. Technology helps us uncover multiple versions. The next step is to make sure we don’t pay multiple times for the same article.
Yvonne Chan
lse721
Duplication is a big part of searching in health, but a far bigger problem is not knowing whether your searches are systematic, comprehensive.
The issue with Google Scholar is what it does not include is important, maybe even life-threatening. – Dean