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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

SSRN's Search Engine

A few weeks ago, I posted a paper to the SSRN website, Ordinary Creativity in Patent Law.  This morning, I had a few extra moments to catch up to read recent articles and so I ran the word "Patent" through SSRN's search engine.  When I re-ordered them by date to find the most recent ones, I discovered that there were only fourteen results for 2010.  

This seems low to me--my own paper was not among the results and neither was another paper by a colleague that had been posted in February 2010 (both have the word "Patent" in the title).  When I emailed SSRN, I was told their search engine only pulls a certain amount of submissions with a specific keyword at a time.  

I had assumed that SSRN's search results were comprehensive --apparently not and it depends on the search term.  Well, now I know.

Posted by Amy Landers on May 11, 2010 at 06:57 PM | Permalink

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Comments

It also appears that the search distinguishes between singular and plural forms. E.g., searching titles for "veteran" does not find results that use "veterans" and vice versa.

Posted by: James | May 12, 2010 11:15:30 AM

scarily, the best way to search SSRN is google and/or google scholar. Not the only site that's true for.

Posted by: Michael Risch | May 11, 2010 8:42:14 PM

I've noticed this as well, however the less used Selected Works by BePress doesn't have this problem see advanced search here:

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/query.cgi?advanced=1&field_1=ancestor.link&value_1=http%3A%2F%2Fworks.bepress.com&op_1=in&connector_1=and&hidden_1=1

I've always been confused about why Selected Works hasn't caught on. Perhaps it's the lack of public download counts, or maybe SSRN started earlier and cornered the market.

Posted by: Greg McNeal | May 11, 2010 8:42:01 PM

Disturbing!

Posted by: Joe Miller | May 11, 2010 8:14:53 PM

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