[Taxacom] Finding articles

[Francisco Welter-Schultes]

I also thought that less was online, this is why I counted them, the 
80 % result surprised me too. It was more than I expected. Perhaps it 
is because you always spend more time with the 20 % you do not get. 
And then you get the subjective feeling it is more.

It is also possible that the list was biased towards digitised 
literature (I might have cited less papers of those I had not seen), 
but I do not really believe that this effect would account for a 
difference of more than 5 %. I had to cite all original descriptions 
of a predetermined number of 2200 species, and these did not ask 
whether their original sources were online or not. 

This was a general European fauna. If you try to do the same with 
1000 papers on Italian fauna it will be less. If you do it with North 
American fauna, I would expect more than 80 %.

BHL librarians asked me recently to tell them which ones were 
the serial runs with gaps. But my feeling of the current situation 
is that almost all serial runs have gaps, at least 80 %, and that BHL 
librarians could just look for the gaps themselves, it would not be 
difficult to find them. The Science example is typical, by no way an 
exception.

Francisco
University of Goettingen, Germany
www.animalbase.org