If You Can’t Retrieve it, Does it Exist? Accessibility of LIS Journals on the Internet

Public access to the World Wide Web became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and today documents are frequently published on the Internet. Open access (OA) to the scientific literature has been found to be increasing as more and more producers and publishers of scientific literature make their publications available free of charge on the Internet. The paper puts forward that it may be argued that only scholarly Internet documents that are retrievable through the search engine Google Scholar (GS) can be said to exist. The degree of coverage of GS is thus an important issue. The paper reports the results of a study of 159 journals in the field of Library and Information Science and their degree of coverage in GS. Journals publishing many issues a year are not found to be more retrievable than journals with fewer issues. Non-English and OA journals tend to have a lower degree of retrievability. The tendency is found to be even stronger for journals that are both OA and non-English. OA and non-English journals are very heterogeneous groups and the variation in their degree of retrievability is found to be much higher than in the case of traditional, toll-access journals, which resemble each other more in relation to retrievability