A comparison of manual and online searching of government document indexes

The online and printed equivalents of the GPO's Monthly Catalog, the National Technical Information Service's Government Reports Announcements & Index, and Congressional Information Service's CIS Index have been examined to compare the recall, precision, overlap, and cost-effectiveness of online and manual searching. The online searches were less labor intensive and retrieved more relevant citations than the manual searches. However, a large number of citations retrieved were not duplicated in equivalent printed and online indexes.