There is, it seems to me, an unacknowledged non-dysfunctional purpose served by journal issues that would be difficult to satisfy with any search interface: non-duplication. Once a researcher has scanned the table of contents for an issue looking for articles of interest, that person feels no need to look at those articles again. If those previously scanned and ignored articles show up repeatedly in a search query (worse yet, if there are half a dozen instances of the same article content in the search, the same or slightly different versions from different sources) that is not only annoying, but a waste of the researcher's time spent keeping up with the literature.
News readers for RSS feeds of journals handle this non-duplicative purpose nicely; a search query-based RSS feed could serve the same purpose but the technical requirements are somewhat different from just searching. Though perhaps that's what you were implying by "the power of online boolean search", the need for tracking what has previously been looked at (whether read or not) needs to be acknowledged. Arthur Smith Stevan Harnad wrote: > On 5-Oct-09, at 8:49 PM, Klaus Graf wrote: > > > 2009/10/6 Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk>: > > > > > (5) A journal issue is just a hodge-podge of mostly unrelated > > > articles; no > > > need to "reconstruct" that; open access to all the articles plus good > > > boolean search power is all that's needed. > > > > I do not think that you can prescribe readers how to browse journal > > issues. There are lots of theme-issues where browsing makes sense. > > Then just retrieve all and only the entire theme-issue with a suitable > boolean descriptor... > > (You vastly underestimate the power of online boolean search over an > OA inverted full-text corpus -- and you also overestimate the > persistence of obsolete, dysfunctional habits, once more powerful > means become available. But the real reason all this prognostication > is missing the mark is the persistent absence of most of the target OA > full-text corpus. The latent power is not at all evident from the > arbitrary, sparse OA subset we have so far. Until the token drops and > we realize that the only thing standing between us and that full > corpus is author keystrokes -- and that all that is needed to inspire > those author keystrokes is Green OA self-archiving mandates from > universities and funders -- our imaginations will continue to fail, > and mislead us.) > >