I have completed a fairly detailed comparison of the A-Z lists
supplied by Serials Solutions and SFX. The full document is linked for
you to download and devour.
As of mid-September, Serials Solutions lists nearly 23,000 titles,
while SFX lists slightly more than 20,000 titles. So why the big
difference?
Serials Solutions is fairly free in its definition of
"electronic serial." Of the nearly 3,000 items it lists that SFX does
not, at least 1,000 are annual conference and symposium proceedings
from IEEE and ACM. Serials Solutions is listing these items by their
conference title rather than by their series title. They are difficult
to locate in the list even if a user feels like browsing.
SFX
directly accesses these items, either through a user's click on the
K-State Get It button or through their use of the Citation Linker. Each
item in these well-established series has an ISSN, so SFX can usually
generate a valid OpenURL to find what is requested.
There are certainly other possible explanations for the nearly 3,000
title difference between the two A-Z lists, but none that accounts for
so many titles and fits such a large pattern.
Download ComparisonAtoZlistsSerSolSFX.xls
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