How to Find Researchers on the Internet (to get article reprints)

Chana Lajcher - Reference Librarian
Jerusalem College of Technology

There is a time honored custom of requesting article reprints of research articles. Most authors are pleased to do this; after all, they want their material to be read by interested students and by other researchers. Aside from making possible professional contacts, this is a way for you to save money on interlibrary loan charges.

The object is to get the researchers' full names and name of the place (institution) where they work, in order to send them email or a fax.

Start by taking the researchers last names and listing them as a group. They are probably a work group so a search on all the names together may work. Look carefully at the Google abstracts to see if one of the hits is the laboratory or division. Prefer the .edu sites if the group is from a university. The other Google hits will probably be genealogical so it is easy to ignore them.

example: Khanokh Slovik Landau Nitzan

If you do not find the work group, perhaps you will find the full name of one of the researchers as a participant at a conference. If so, put the full name in quotation marks and try again. Look carefully at the conference listing - it should name the researcher's institution.

Sometimes if the names involved are too common, it helps to add a few keywords like important words from the title of the target article.

example: Nitzan photoplethysmographic

Conversely, if the researcher happens to have the same name as a rock star, actor, or sports figure, will want to not out the team (or the band), using the - command.

example: david kessler physics -fda

An alternative is to find a database or collection of articles (or abstracts or an index) in the field, and look for the authors in the database. Then choose the newest item and take the author affiliation. This is the name of the institution the author works for. Medline, SPIE, USPTO and other free databases list the affiliation.

Another way to find the institution is to find a professional organization. Often these have membership listings and may even have the email right in the directory.

Once we know the name of the institution, we can look for that organization and try to find the researcher in the internal campus telephone/email directory. Google usually does not see inside internal phone directories so you must do this from within the university's site. Sometimes, the site will also have an internal search engine so we can also look for mention of the researcher in a press release.

Google has a special section for university websites. Google University Search. This is not the same as the internal directory or engine of the university's site so it will give different results. Try both.

A note for Israeli and Russian researchers - be aware that the authors may have variations of their names. There may be different transliterations, bad spellings, and sometimes people have changed their names from non-Hebrew to Hebrew. Russian researchers can have complex names that include their parents' names in their own (looks like "middle names").

example: Sandler: Yuri, Yury, Yu. M., Uziel, Uzi
These are all the same person!

Home pages
Researchers often have a few home pages. The institution may have written pages for each person, and the laboratory or research group may have a page. The researcher him/herself may have a page, and may also have a page for personal interests (useful if you want to send an email to the researcher's pet cat?). The researcher's own page should have the best and most up-to-date contact information, and as a bonus - may even have the article reprint right there. (look for "publications").

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Chana Lajcher - Reference Librarian
Jerusalem College of Technology
Machon Lev
Jerusalem, Israel