Here are the answers to the most common questions I get concerning GooseRef.
- finding what you want - the
most common reason you can't find what you want is that you have forgotten
that in most titles, goose and geese are both used. Thus, if you want
everything on snow geese, you'll need to search for snow goose first, and
then snow geese separately. It IS possible to rewrite the search routing
to be smart about this, but I haven't done so yet. Someday! Also, you
might not understand what I mean by "keywords". Click here for some pointers.
-
mailing the results - this seems to work just fine for most people,
but there is a known bug in older versions of Eudora (and perhaps other
programs) where long mail files are broken up into multiple pieces. The
solution is either to either upgrade your e.mail software, or do the
following: search for the keyword(s) you have in mind, with the condition
that it fall in a certain year. For instance, search on snow goose 1973.
This gives you all the snow goose papers published in 1973.
Mail these to yourself. Then, search
again using snow goose 1974, mail these to yourself, and so on. A bit
cumbersome, but it DOES work.
- I only get the titles - where are the papers? - I must get at
least one of these a month, from someone who has e.mailed themselves the
output from GooseRef, and is then puzzled as to why they've received only
the titles to the papers, and not the full text of the papers themselves.
GooseRef is NOT a paper delivery service - it is ONLY a bibliographic
system for finding the TITLES of papers which may be relevant to a
particular search. Do you really think I'd (a) violate every copyright law
known to man and put full text of EVERY paper online, and then (b) give it
away for free? I don't think so...
- I know that there is a Tech Report XYZ on goose species XXX - why isn't it in GooseRef? - Easy...the magic word here is "primary" scientific literature - meaning refereed scientific journals. While there is no doubt some good stuff in the "grey" literature, much of it is simple data collation, hard to find, and of little general interest.