biblio indexes

[Susan Ervin-Tripp]

Beverly Flanigan reminds me that the LLBA has the advantage
over MLA of (like PsychInfo) providing abstracts. It is also
possible to find abstracts in which the person you are interested in
is mentioned, not just their own authored work.
However, online LLBA doesn't understand hyphens, so you have to
play around with names like mine. For me and for Karmiloff-Smith,
you would have to omit the hyphen and second part!!

In my case the LLBA hit rate is
between PsychInfo and MLA, so MLA still comes out best. I assume
these hit rates depend on where people publish so they won't be
the same for everyone on whom you try this test. For instance,
for Dan Slobin the rate is 29 for LLBA, 37 for Psychinfo and
42 for MLA. And of course topic hit rates could vary a lot.

For those who like to construct computer reference bases by programs like
Endnote or ProCite, the best procedure would be to start with the
sources with abstracts, add the references with their abstracts,
and then go to the sources without abstracts, with instructions to
reject duplicates when you download.

Susan Ervin-Tripp