CARL Uncover2 or faxon finder? A comparison of articles and journals in CARL Uncover2 and faxon finder

As the number of online searching systems and electronic document delivery services increase, librarians are faced with having to make decisions about which system to acquire. Faxon Finder and UnCover2 are two well-known systems currently available and competing for users. On the surface, these two systems appear to be more or less the same, and one might suppose that searching either would yield approximately the same kind of bibliographic citations for users. To test this assumption, seven subjects in various disciplines were searched in each system and then compared from the point of view of journal article overlap and journal overlap. For these seven disciplines the average overlap in journal articles was 29.9%; the average overlap in journals was 33.6%. The results of this preliminary study show a startling lack of overlap, suggesting that both systems cover different ground and that a standard and general purpose database system has yet to be found.