PDF page numbering variations between print & online! Shirley Rais 02 Dec 2004 01:14 UTC

Here's the situation: I found a whole issue of a journal in ScienceDirect
where the pdfs of every article differ from the pagination of the print
issue.  PubMed indexes the print issue.  It's Journal of the American
College of Surgeons v185:2, Aug 1997

We noticed this with one article when a student tried to link from PubMed's
LinkOut to ScienceDirect and got a message that the article was not
available.  So we went directly to ScienceDirect to find the article and the
citation page numbering from Pubmed didn't match the pdfs in ScienceDirect.
I compared the print copy to the pdfs in ScienceDirect and every  pdf has
different pagination from the original print.  PubMed's citations match the
print pages.

Which one is a researcher supposed to cite?  Why are they even different if
a pdf is supposed to be a "reproduction" of the original?  How widespread is
this?  AARGh!

Shirley Rais, Serials Librarian
Loma Linda University Libraries
11072 Anderson St.
Loma Linda, CA  92350-0001

Phone: (909) 558-4583
FAX: (909) 558-4919
Srais@llu.edu