While no statistics are to hand, it is likely that many more readers access conference
papers than attend the conferences, and that most readers of journal papers do
so without having an individual copy of the journal. Increasingly conference and
journal papers are held online. Often, particularly in the case of science and
technology papers, this is by Thomson ISI's Web of Science, Elsevier's Science
Direct or Springer's Springerlink. Searches can be performed for papers of interest
using a web search engine that indexes academic publications, for example Google
Scholar [16], Scirius, CiteSeeeX and IEEEXplore. Google Scholar will only display
index entries for which users are provided with a freely available abstract of the
paper [17], and it gives primacy to full text versions.