The Shape of Code

What is the best way to locate a freely downloadable copy of a report or paper on the web? The process I follow is outlined below (if you are new to this, you should first ask yourself whether reading a scientific paper will produce the result you are expecting):

1. Google search. For the last 20 years, my experience is that Google search is the best place to look first.

   Search on the title enclosed in double-quotes; if no exact matches are returned, the title you have may be slightly incorrect (variations in the typos of citations have been used to construct researcher cut-and-paste genealogies, i.e., authors copying a citation from a paper into their own work, rather than constructing one from scratch or even reading the paper being cited). Searching without quotes may return the desired result, or lots of unrelated matched. In the unrelated matches case, quote substrings within the title or include the first author’s surname.

   The search may return a link to a ResearchGate page without a download link. There may be a “Request full-text” link. Clicking this sends a request email to one of the authors (assuming ResearchGate has an address), who will often respond with a copy of the paper.

   A search may not return any matches, or links to copies that are freely available. Move to the next stage,

2. Google Scholar. This is a fantastic resource. This site may link to a freely downloadable copy, even though a Google search does not. It may also return a match, even though a Google search does not. Most of the time, it is not necessary to include the title in quotes.

   If the title matches a paper without displaying a link to a downloaded pdf, click on the match’s “Cited by” link (assuming it has one). The author may have published a later version that is available for download. If the citation count is high, tick the “Search within citing articles” box and try narrowing the search. For papers more than about five years old, you can try a “Customer range…” to remove more recent citations.

   No luck? Move to the next stage,

3. If a freely downloadable copy is available on the web, why doesn’t Google link to it?

   A website may have a robots.txt requesting that the site not be indexed, or access to report/paper titles may be kept in a site database that Google does not access.

   Searches now either need to be indirect (e.g., using Google to find an author web page, which may contain the sought after file), or targeted at specific cases.

It’s now all special cases. Things to try:

• Author’s website. Personal web pages are common for computing-related academics (much less common for non-computing, especially business oriented), but often a year or two out of date. Academic websites usually show up on a Google search. For new (i.e., less than a year), when you don’t need to supply a public link to the paper, email the authors asking for a copy. Most are very happy that somebody is interested in their work, and will email a copy.

  When an academic leaves a University, their website is quickly removed (MIT is one of the few that don’t do this). If you find a link to a dead site, the Wayback Machine is the first place to check (try less recent dates first). Next, the academic may have moved to a new University, so you need to find it (and hope that the move is not so new that they have not yet created a webpage),

• Older reports and books. The Internet Archive is a great resource,
• Journals from the 1950s/1960s, or computer manuals. bitsavers.org is the first place to look,
• Reports and conference proceedings from before around 2000. It might be worth spending a few £/$ at a second hand book store; I use Amazon, AbeBooks, and Biblio. Despite AbeBooks being owned by Amazon, availability/pricing can vary between the two,
• A PhD thesis? If you know the awarding university, Google search on ‘university-name “phd thesis”‘ to locate the appropriate library page. This page will probably include a search function; these search boxes sometimes supporting ‘odd’ syntax, and you might have to search on: surname date, keywords, etc. Some universities have digitized thesis going back to before 1900, others back to 2000, and others to 2010.

  The British Library has copies of thesis awarded by UK universities, and they have digitized thesis going back before 2000,

• Accepted at a conference. A paper accepted at a conference that has not yet occurred, maybe available in preprint form; otherwise you are going to have to email the author (search on the author names to find their university/GitHub webpage and thence their email),
• Both CiteSeer and then Semantic Scholar were once great resources. These days, CiteSeer has all but disappeared, and Semantic Scholar seems to mostly link to publisher sites and sometimes to external sites.

Dead-tree search techniques are a topic for history books.

More search suggestions welcome.