Another group test:
| JURN group test: “Tristram Shandy” reception April 2014. Searching for free full-text scholarly articles, theses or book chapters variously related to the reception of the famous and seminal book Tristram Shandy. Clicked through on possible results, and briefly evaluated. |
|||||||||||
| DOAJ | 0 | Used ‘Article’ search. 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| JournalTOCS | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Ingenta Connect | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Journal Seek | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Mendeley | 0 | Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only — which produced no relevant results. Then removed the OA filter, which gave one possible result of around 15 — but that proved to be ‘404 not found’. | |||||||||
| OATD | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| OAlib | 0 | OAlib appeared to be nearly totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, only four results of the first 50 being about Tristram Shandy. | |||||||||
| BASE | 1 | Searched ‘Verbatim’ on ‘Entire Document’. Examined first 50 results. | |||||||||
| NDLtd | 1 | 1 of only two results. | |||||||||
| Microsoft Academic | 1 | 1 of only one result. | |||||||||
| CORE | 2 | CORE appeared to be totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, so I tried again with just “Tristram Shandy” + set the filter to just English results. | |||||||||
| OPENDoar | 3 | Examined first 50 results. | |||||||||
| Digital Commons Network | 3 | From 10 results. Only one hit was strongly relevant. | |||||||||
| Google Search | 4 | Using unmodified Internet Explorer 11, not signed in to Google. Forced verbatim. Examined first 50 results. Didn’t count Google Books links. | |||||||||
| Google Scholar | 4 | Examined first 50 results. Google Books links not counted. Faux PDF links for hs3esdk.ru and kmvhr3.biz (dubious-looking Project Muse duplicates in Russia, presumably eager to accept your credit card details!) not counted. | |||||||||
| JURN | 14 | Checked first 50 results, not counting articles or chapters that mention the book title in passing. | |||||||||
Overall, all the search engines tested here struggled with this search, though might have done better with additional keywords.
Google Books also struggled somewhat with this test, picking up only three titles with free preview pages. However, it may interest readers to see the full list of titles found by Google Books:
The Reception of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.
The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy.
Shandymania (actually a thesis).
A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers and the Art of Bodysnatching.
Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism.
The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.
Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators.
Compare this with the following additional book titles which were discovered by Amazon UK:
Adaptations of Laurence Sterne’s Fiction.
Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
Sterne: The Critical Heritage.
Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760-1868.
Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel.
The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne.
WorldCat was able to pick up two additional book titles to add to the above lists, of six titles found in total:
* Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.
* The Created Self : the reader’s role in eighteenth-century fiction.
The critical reception and parodies of Tristram Shandy.
The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800.
Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.
So Google Books, Amazon UK, and WorldCat proved a useful trio for quick initial location of likely book titles. With the added advantage that some of the titles found by Google Books and Amazon offer free previews of pages or even whole chapters.
Not all is as it seems, however. The seemingly spot-on The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy (1950) appears to be a ‘ghost’ book, being a database record generated by a long-lost 1950 Masters disseration at Columbia University NYC written by Gloria P. Freeman. So no chance of getting that one cheap on Amazon for $2.
In its first 50 results Summon (limited to: Books | in English | Criticism or History) only managed to pick up three suitable titles: Labyrinth of digressions: Tristram Shandy as perceived and influenced by Sterne’s Early imitators; and Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception; and Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
The British Library catalogue could only turn up two books in two results, The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800 (in its thesis form), and Turning into Sterne : Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.