How can I find an old paper when the usual methods fail? 121ar Vv:lT,154ane tidp Zluetubzd
I am trying to find the paper "The resistance of pure mercury at helium temperatures" by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. It was published in the Communications from the Laboratory of Physics at the University of Leiden in 1911.
This is the first publication of the discovery of superconductivity and it is cited in many texts dealing with the subject. However, I was unsuccessful in finding the actual content of the paper with the methods: My university's library catalogue, Google Scholar and Google. I even tried the catalogue of Leiden University, but no luck there either.
Due to the significance of the paper and the fact that Leiden University still exists, I am fairly certain that the paper is not lost completely and I am just unable to find it.
Are there any other resources I can use to get ahold of this paper?
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125Ask a librarian. This is literally their job. – iayork 2 days ago
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46@iayork: Indeed, "ask a librarian" ought to be considered one of the "usual methods". – Nate Eldredge 2 days ago
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10@iayork Oh right, that's what those are for. Will do. – schtandard 2 days ago
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10Check if your library is part of an inter-library loan system. Our ILL system is partly automated, and I get about 80% of requests back in a few days or so. – wwarriner 2 days ago
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9@AnonymousPhysicist I would be very surprised if it was in German, since Kamerlingh Onnes was Dutch and publishing in a Dutch venue... – Kyle yesterday
7 Answers
Why don´t you contact the Leiden University´s library for advice? I´m sure that the library has a copy of it, and they might have translations as well.
The author seems to be very prolific, the library has many pieces of his work listed on their online catalog.
https://www.library.universiteitleiden.nl/search?q=Kamerlingh
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15"The author seems to be very prolific, the library has many pieces of his work listed on their online catalog." Yes, this is to be expected of a Nobel prize winner, not? – BrtH 2 days ago
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8Sure! I had no idea who the author was. I just offered a workaround to find the paper. :) – onpre 2 days ago
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1That was close. Going by the name "Heike," I assumed a female and was going to correct you on your pronouns. "Heike" in Germany today is an exclusively female name. Apparently, that doesn't apply to the Netherlands one hundred years ago. Fortunately, I looked the person up on Wikipedia first. – JRE 2 days ago
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2@JRE Just going by "Heike", I would've assumed the author is part of an old samurai clan: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Heike – Kimball yesterday
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5The first point of call should actually be OP's home library - the librarian at OP's home institution should be able to manage procuring the article from Leiden. That's one of their primary functions. – J... yesterday
In the future, your university librarians are MADE for this! Don't feel ashamed to ask -- there are librarians more into archiving and cataloging, and some more into education and service.
Give as much information as you currently have, and they'll find it for you AND/OR show you how to find it yourself in the future (if it's accessible via a resource like some of those mentioned above.)
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2+1 for "ask the librarian". Which he kinda did since some of them are lurking here in academia.se – Mindwin 20 hours ago
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+1. I recently did this, but felt a little reluctant to "impose" on someone. However the librarian was fairly adamant that tracking things down was not only part of his job, but also one of the fun parts (at least for him). He was also crazy good at it--I had a pdf within a few hours, after unsuccessfully trying to track it down for a few weeks on my own. – Matt 11 hours ago
A reprint of the paper is available under DOI 10.1007/978-94-009-2079-8_15, the complete title is "Further experiments with liquid helium. C. On the change of electric resistance of pure metals at very low temperatures etc. IV. The resistance of pure mercury at helium temperatures."
I was able to find this by excluding the author's given name; this expands the search to include repositories that only track given names by the first initial.
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2Link: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-2079-8_15 – Anonymous Physicist yesterday
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4Free link: sci-hub.tw/https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/… – Ciprian Tomoiagă yesterday
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9@Dancrumb, fair enough. I originally wanted to leave it as just a comment, but figured it'd be more useful as an answer. My process: I knew that Heike Kamerlingh Onnes is usually referred to as just Kamerlingh Onnes. Googling
"The resistance of pure mercury at helium temperatures" Kamerlingh Onnesgave this reprint as the first result. Since no-one had given the correct paper yet, I gave it here. Interestingly, Googling for"The resistance of pure mercury at helium temperatures" Heike Kamerlingh Onnesdoes not find the paper, which I suspect is what @schtandard did. – BrtH yesterday -
5@Scientist, I'm not critiquing or requesting clarification from the author. – BrtH yesterday
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8@BrtH thanks for expanding; I took the liberty of making an edit to your answer that covers this... I think it's very instructive to note that removing the author's given name significantly improved the search results. – Dancrumb yesterday
You can find the paper in this PDF.
This page says that the "Communications from the Laboratory of Physics at the University of Leiden" from June 1898 onward, were included in the Proceedings of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), whose website is this one.
If you search the publications by author, the results for Kamerlingh Onnes contain the top link.
This is a use-case for Sci-Hub, an open collection of papers from various journals. In this particular case, you can find your paper right here. Note that using Sci-Hub to access copyrighted materials which they do not have permission to give you is illegal in certain jurisdictions. Otherwise, it's legal to download.
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Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – StrongBad♦ 20 hours ago
I checked Delft University Library, as it's the largest library for technical works in the Netherlands. They indeed have Communications from the Physical Laboratory of the University of Leiden., volumes 18 (1895) through 216 (1931).
They also note that additional copies exist at Leiden University Library itself and various other Dutch universities.
To expand upon the answer by BrtH, the paper (or rather, a reprint of the paper) is one of the first results when you google "The resistance of pure mercury at helium temperatures" (quotes not necessary); googling would generally be considered a usual method, but I imagine when you did that you thought this paper was not the one you were looking for because of the title ("Further experiments with liquid helium. C. On the change of electric resistance of pure metals at very low temperatures etc. IV. The resistance of pure mercury at helium temperatures"). Thus, I suppose the only method you'd need to apply next time is to carefully consider if the work you are looking for has an alternative title.
