Google Scholar now links to "Evidence of Influences," 2.0 on Researchgate

In mid-February, Google Scholar finally linked to the Researchgate version of my paper Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0. On February 6, the link to the paper (on course1.winona.edu) was still dead, but by February 13, the Researchgate link was up and running. Thanks, Google Scholar.

Findability of texts is a curious problem on the Internet. On February 2, right after I had taken down my course1 copy of Evidences 2.0, a couple of users found my website via search engines, evidently hunting for the 2.0 version of the paper. These users apparently experienced the dead link in Google Scholar and were hunting for the text on the open Internet. Oddly, users could find the webpage for the Researchgate copy of the paper through regular Google, but not through Google Scholar.

The fact that users were looking for the paper when they would have directly downloaded it before confirmed for me why I moved the paper: Back when the only copy of the paper was on the course1 server, I could not tell how many times it was downloaded because I did not have access to the log statistics. Now I have usage statistics.

Researchgate statistics: On January 26, 2016, Evidence had 19 reads on RG, and on February 29, it had 33 reads.