Articles, papers, chapters, theses - who wins the visibility wars?

Researchers need access to previous research to base their own work on. Some of the most commonly referenced materials are published in the form of journal articles, conference papers, books and book chapters, and research theses. The purpose of this research was to determine how these four categories of documents compare in terms of visibility to search engine crawlers. A questionnaire was used to gather data from international scholars on their completed research. Three types of queries were generated and over 3000 Web sites were inspected to determine the visibility of these outputs. Search engine result pages were inspected, and the rankings of the research documents were recorded and converted to a scoring system. The results have indicated that the four types of outputs enjoy varying degrees of exposure to search engines, with journal articles leading the way, and books/book chapters having the smallest degree of exposure to search engines. Some query types also produced better results than others. It was concluded that journal articles provide the best way to expose research work to Internet searchers through search engines.