  We present a detailed analysis of four of the most widely used radio source
finding packages in radio astronomy, and a program being developed for the
Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. The four
packages; SExtractor, SFind, IMSAD and Selavy are shown to produce source
catalogues with high completeness and reliability. In this paper we analyse the
small fraction (~1%) of cases in which these packages do not perform well. This
small fraction of sources will be of concern for the next generation of radio
surveys which will produce many thousands of sources on a daily basis, in
particular for blind radio transients surveys. From our analysis we identify
the ways in which the underlying source finding algorithms fail. We demonstrate
a new source finding algorithm Aegean, based on the application of a Laplacian
kernel, which can avoid these problems and can produce complete and reliable
source catalogues for the next generation of radio surveys.
