Chapter 4
Subject Headings and Descriptors in Databases for Journal Articles
A library’s online public access catalog (opac) will be useful for identifying books relevant to your topic; it may also cover other formats (maps, photos, manuscripts, etc., or even a few selected websites), but it will not index individual journal, magazine, or newspaper articles. For the latter, there are many hundreds of commercially produced databases to which libraries can simply subscribe without having to duplicate (via their own staff’s efforts) the work of indexing hundreds of thousands of individual articles in addition to the books acquired in their local collections. It is true that some libraries provide “discovery” search capabilities, whereby multiple databases (including both the local OPAC and the commercial databases to which the library subscribes) can be searched simultaneously from a single search box.1 The idea here is, in the currently fashionable terminology, to break down barriers between different “silos” of information so that “everything” can be searched “seamlessly” through one search box.
“Discovery” or federated searching of multiple sources is occasionally quite useful, as I will show later, but it also creates as many problems as it solves. This is because many important trade-offs among the different databases are concealed when only one search approach is provided to all of them at once. The peculiar vocabularies (descriptors) and “limit” features of individual files are usually the very features that make the individual databases most useful, but these are essentially buried or lost entirely in cross-searching.
In any event, remember that when you search any library’s online catalog by itself, you are not getting access to individual journal articles. The title of the journal as a whole (e.g., Harvard Business Review, Accounting Journal, History of Religions) will indeed be included in the OPAC, with a blanket call number applied to all of its individual volumes, but the catalog record will tell you nothing about the subject contents of any individual articles within the run of the journal. For that kind of access, you need the separate indexes to periodicals (i.e., popular magazines, scholarly journals, newspapers, etc.) produced by commercial vendors such as ProQuest, EBSCOhost, or Gale.
Descriptors and Thesauri
Although all databases that index journals can be searched by keywords, some can also be searched by subject headings or “descriptors”—the latter being another designation for controlled vocabulary terms. Descriptors, however, are usually single words or short phrases and do not have the more elaborate phrase structures of Library of Congress Subject Headings with precoordinated subdivision strings (see Chapter 2). Nonetheless, the purpose of descriptors is like that of subject headings: within a given database, they serve as standardized collocation or “grouping” mechanisms. In Historical Abstracts, for example, the descriptor Normandy Landing serves to round up articles whose titles use many different keywords: “D-Day,” “Overlord,” “Omaha Beach,” “The Longest Day,” and so on. If you find the right descriptors for your topic, your results will be much better than if you simply type in the keywords that you think of yourself. Descriptors, like subject headings, solve the problem of variant synonyms for the same concept; they are an analogous method of “controlling” or standardizing the search terms within a particular database.
Many databases, especially full-text files, use no descriptors at all; in those, you do need to think up as many relevant keyword terms and phrases as you can, and you’ll essentially use the same keyword guesses in all of the uncontrolled files you search. When you search files using descriptors as subject terms, however, you will usually get the best results by tailoring your searches individually within each database, because it is not a safe assumption that the descriptors are standardized across multiple databases. (In contrast, it generally is safe to assume that book catalogs in large libraries will use the same list of Library of Congress Subject Headings for their category terms.) There are some exceptions, however: Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life, the two largest indexes to history journals, generally use the same descriptors, and the different ProQuest databases covering current newspaper articles use the same indexing terms.
Some individual databases have a separately published “thesaurus” listing the approved subject descriptors for use in that file, for example:
Descriptor fields in online records for journal articles are, then, analogous to the subject tracings that show up on catalog records for books. They show the controlled terms that the indexers have added to the merely-transcribed keywords of the article citation (or abstract) itself.
The Importance of “Full” Displays
In a standard library OPAC a book with the title Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power is cataloged with the subject tracing Chechnia (Russia)—History—Civil War, 1994–. In the Historical Abstracts database covering journal articles, however, an article with the title “Russo-Chechen Conflict, 1800–2000: A Deadly Embrace” is indexed with three different descriptors: War, Russia, and Chechnia (Russia). This important descriptor/subject field is most graphically emphasized in the “Detailed record” format (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2).
Figure 4.1 Historical Abstracts brief record for article “Russo-Chechen Conflict, 1800–2000: A Deadly Embrace.”
Figure 4.2 Historical Abstracts detailed record for the same article shown in Figure 4.1, showing descriptors with arrows pointing to them.
It is always a good idea to look at the “Full” or “Detailed” display of any good record you find, rather than the default brief display. In many databases, only the full record will show you the controlled (or standardized) terms that the indexers have assigned, which are the subject words you will need to use for the most systematic retrieval. (In some databases, the list of controlled terms, gleaned from the set of retrieved records, will show up automatically as a sidebar.)
In this database, some of the citations and abstracts use the keywords “Chechnya” (with a “y”) or “Chechen”—but the standardized descriptor Chechnia (Russia), attached to all such variants, enables them to be retrieved all together.
This brings up a point alluded to earlier on a major problem with federated searching—i.e., doing searches across multiple databases simultaneously. Note that Historical Abstracts uses a descriptor with the spelling Chechnia. But the PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) database—one of the very best for coverage of international relations—uses the descriptor Chechnya, while the Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies database uses the spelling Chechenskii (in its descriptor Chechenskii krizis 1991– ). If you search all three files simultaneously using a term that is standardized for only one of them, you will miss most of what the other two databases have to offer without realizing you have missed the bulk of what is available. But you might still readily conclude—erroneously—that you have “covered” all three because, technically, you were searching all of them at once. I will have more to say on federated searching later, but in general remember this: unless your search terms are unusually distinctive (i.e., not subject to variant forms) you will usually be better off searching relevant databases one at a time, with their own terminologies, rather than mashing them together in a single federated or “discovery” search.
This advice runs directly counter to a fashionable belief in the library field, noted above, that information should not be segregated in different “silos” but, rather, should be merged all together into a single “seamless” search. The silo databases for individual disciplinary areas are there for a reason, however: they cover the most important journals within their subjects, undiluted by thousands of tangential periodicals, and they enable those core journals to be indexed with special standardized terms that are the most appropriate to their own fields.
Access to descriptor terms, via the technique of always looking at the “Detailed” (or “Full”) display of any relevant retrieved record, will always be possible even if the record is initially found through a keyword search and even if the database does not provide direct access to a formal list of it indexing terms in a separate thesaurus. For access to the latter, keep an eye out for any clickable tab saying “Thesaurus” or “Subjects” or “Browse” or “Topics” at the top or side of your search screen. (My experience is that most researchers don’t even notice these tabs, let alone use them.) These displays tend to change or even disappear in unpredictable ways, however, especially when one database vendor is bought out by another—a rather frequent occurrence. In any event, whether or not you use the tabs, always look at the Detailed or Full display of any relevant record you find to see which indexing terms are being used by that database.
LCSH vs. Descriptors
Note, too, an important difference between LCSH subject headings vs. descriptors, namely, that databases using descriptors as indexing terms often use very broad categories (e.g., War, with no specification of which war). The assumption is that specificity will be achieved by Boolean “AND” combinations of several terms, each serving to limit the scope of the others when all are specified simultaneously. Thus Historical Abstracts indexes articles on the Chechnian conflict by requiring a combination such as “Chechnia AND (Russia OR Soviet Union) AND (War OR Violence),” whereas LCSH provides a single string, Chechnia—History—Civil War, 1994–. (See the discussion of precoordination vs. postcoordination in Chapter 2.) Descriptors are usually one- or two-word terms, not extended strings. Combining them, or course, requires you to know in advance which descriptor terms you wish to combine—whereas LCSH subject strings (in browse displays) enable you to recognize many of the combinations you want. Thesauri of descriptors may be arranged differently than the LSCH list; cross-references may be lacking; subdivisions will be minimal (if present at all); and there will certainly be no linkages to LC classification numbers.
What is very confusing to many researchers is that the same databases that use either descriptors or subject headings can also be searched by keywords—that is, the “natural language” words used by the authors of the articles (or books). These are the words that appear within sources themselves, either in their full texts or just in their titles or abstracts. Descriptors, in contrast, come from formal lists of standardized terms, used by professional indexers, and descriptors, like subject headings, are added to records, rather than transcribed from them, in order to create retrievable terms held in common on records that otherwise might not have any shared keywords, even though they are talking about the same subjects. Again, however, many databases lack descriptors (or subject headings) entirely—they can be searched only by keywords. I’ll return to this crucial distinction in the next chapter.
Major Subscription Databases That Use Descriptors
For the time being, however, let me discuss a few commercial databases to which many research libraries subscribe and talk a bit more about their descriptor capabilities. (Note that many of the databases described below are licensed by more than one vendor, and so it is possible for the same database to show up within systems having different search softwares.) The Gale Directory of Databases (Gale Cengage, annual) lists over 21,000 online databases available to libraries, so the following clusters of databases provide only a sampling of some of the more important sources. They are arranged by vendor, rather than by subject, because the different search softwares provided by these vendors have different tab displays, usually at the top of any search screen, for getting you into their descriptor indexes. As mentioned above, using these tabs can alert you to cross-references, related terms, and browse menus that can often provide much more on-target results, with much less clutter from irrelevancies, than if you simply type in whatever keywords occur to you. While it is not necessary to read each of the following descriptions in detail, it will be worth your while to at least skim them, because so many of these databases cover much greater ranges of subjects than are apparent from their titles.
EBSCOhost Databases
EBSCO Publishing is a very large vendor offering more than 375 different databases; libraries subscribing to its service will pick and choose which individual files they want, depending on their budgets and clienteles. Be careful, then: an “EBSCO search” in one library may cover very different files from those subscribed to in a different library.
To find the descriptors being used within the individual databases, look for tabs along the top of their search screens with labels such as “Subjects,” “Subject Terms,” “Indexes,” or “Thesaurus” (these will vary from one database to the next). Some (not all) of these links will lead you to browse menus that will bring to your attention many more relevant search terms than you would be able to think up on your own. (These search options will vanish entirely when multiple databases are combined for federated searching, because, again, the subject descriptors and browse menus are very different from one database to the next; and federated searching “sees” only features [primarily keywords] that are common across multiple files.)
Among the more important EBSCOhost databases2 are the following:
Wilson databases: these venerable sources, formerly published by the H.W. Wilson Company, are now mounted on a new search platform. They cover hundreds of the most important journals (and other sources) within their respective fields:
These databases can be searched singly or in a group, and several of them have also now been merged with other EBSCO databases within their respective subject areas. Descriptions of the more important nonmerged Wilson databases are given individually below; those that have been merged into larger EBSCO files are treated in the description of these merged “Source” titles.
Academic Search Complete is one of the largest full-text databases; it indexes over 13,600 journals and provides text searching for nearly 9,100 (7,900 of which are peer-reviewed). More titles are being added continually. Subjects covered include animal science, anthropology, area studies, astronomy, biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, ethnic and multicultural studies, food science and technology, general science, geography, geology, law, materials science, mathematics, mechanical engineering, music, pharmaceutical sciences, physics, psychology, religion and theology, veterinary science, women’s studies, and zoology. For the vast majority of titles, coverage extends only from the 1990s or 2000s forward; however, this database, like JSTOR (see Chapter 5), is digitizing many of its journals, full text, back to their first issues—in some cases as far back as 1887. In addition to searches by keywords and descriptors, Academic Search Complete also offers citation searching (see Chapter 6) within over 1,450 of its titles. A smaller edition of this database called Academic Search Premier indexes the same 13,600+ journals but provides fewer full texts (about 4,700).
AGRICOLA is the largest database for agricultural subjects, including over 4 million citations (but not full texts) of journal articles, book chapters, monographs, dissertations, patents, software, audiovisual material, and technical reports. It covers agriculture, animal and veterinary sciences, entomology, plant sciences, forestry, aquaculture and fisheries, farming and farming systems, agricultural economics, extension and education, food and human nutrition, agricultural engineering and technology, and earth and environmental sciences.
America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts: the former is the largest single database for U.S. and Canadian history, covering subjects from prehistoric times to the present; it indexes about 1,800 journals back to 1955. The corresponding database for all other regions of the world is Historical Abstracts, covering the period from 1450 to the present; it indexes 3,100 journals back to 1955. Both sources index journals in over 40 languages, providing English language abstracts, and both provide extensive coverage of book reviews. (There are also new full-text versions with the titles America: History & Life with Full Text and Historical Abstracts with Full Text.) They are also surprisingly good for current affairs as well as for history; and “history” in these databases is interpreted in a very broad sense—not just geopolitical events, but also history of art, literature, music, education, business, philosophy, photography, science, and so on. (I once helped a researcher who needed to know “how science was taught in France from the 1880s until World War I”—Historical Abstracts could nail that exactly.) It’s worth trying these databases for any subjects having historical aspects.
Applied Science & Business Periodicals Retrospective: 1913–1983 is a combination of three of the old Wilson printed indexes: Industrial Arts Index and its two successors Applied Science & Technology Index and Business Periodicals Index for the years up to 1983. The retrospective (i.e., back to 1913) Industrial Arts/Applied Science component is also included in Applied Science & Technology Source (below), but the retrospective Business and Industrial Arts years (prior to 1982) are found only here—they are not in the other EBSCO Business databases described below.
Applied Science & Technology Source is a merger of the former EBSCO Computers & Applied Sciences Complete database and the Wilson Applied Science & Technology Index/Abstracts/Full Text databases. It covers over 2,200 journals will full texts of about 1,400. The former Wilson Applied Science & Technology Index Retrospective: 1913–1983, which indexes 850 periodicals for this earlier span, is also included, without abstracts or full texts for those years. This combined database covers acoustics, aeronautics and space science, applied mathematics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, atmospheric sciences, automatic control, automotive engineering, chemical engineering, chemistry, civil engineering, communication and information technology, computer databases and software, computer technology and applications, computer theory and systems, construction, electrical and electronic engineering, engineering and biomedical materials, energy resources and research, engineering (civil, electrical, environmental, industrial, mechanical), engineering materials, environmental sciences and waste management, fire and fire prevention, food and food industry, geology, industrial and mechanical arts, machinery, marine technology and oceanography, mathematics, metallurgy, metallurgy, meteorology, mineralogy, neural networks, optical and neural computing, petroleum and gas, physics, plastics, product reviews, robotics, solid state technology, space science, social and professional issues relevant to engineering, telecommunications, textile industry and fabrics, and transportation.
Art Source is a merger of the EBSCO database Art & Architecture Complete and various Wilson databases (Art Index/Abstracts/Full Text); over 700 journals are indexed, with full texts of more than 600, with 220 full texts of books. The former Art Index Retrospective: 1929–1983 is also included, but it does not provide abstracts or full texts for those years. (The Wilson database Art Museum Image Gallery, which provided a digital library of 100,000 images and multimedia sources, has not been included, but over 63,000 images are provided by other sources.) This combined Art database covers general art, advertising art, antiques, archaeology, architecture and architectural history, art history, city planning, computer graphics, computers in art and architecture, contemporary art, costume, crafts, decorative arts, fine arts, folk art, glassware, graphic arts, industrial design, interior design, graphic arts, interior design, jewelry, landscape architecture, motion pictures, museology, non-Western art, painting, photography, pottery, printmaking, sculpture, television, textiles, video, and woodwork.
ATLA Catholic Periodical Literature and Index Online indexes 200 periodicals back to 1981.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLA Serials is the best starting point for journal articles and essays from book anthologies in the fields of religion and theology. The database, produced by the American Theological Libraries Association, indexes 546 current journals plus another 1,138 retrospectively back to 1949 (and in some cases back to the nineteenth century), and also more than 260,000 essays from 16,700 multi-authored books. Full texts of over 230 journals are included.
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals is the largest index in its field, covering over 2,500 U.S. and foreign journals from the 1930s (with selective coverage back to the 1860s, and even to 1741 in one instance [Saggi di dissertazioni accademiche]). Subjects include architecture, archaeology, design, historic preservation, interior design, landscape architecture, urban design, and urban planning history.
Biography Reference Bank covers over 600,000 individuals, with links to 300,000 full-text articles.This combined source covers articles from over 3,500 magazines, thousands of academic journals, and over 9,000 books. Popular full-text Wilson reference series such as Current Biography, World Authors, and Junior Authors & Illustrators are included. The database indexes autobiographies, bibliographies, biographies, book reviews, collections of letters, critical studies, diaries, drama, exhibition reviews, fiction (biographical novels), interviews, journals, juvenile literature, memoirs, obituaries, photos and pictorial works, poetry, and videos. You can search not just by names of individuals but by occupations and subject and genre categories (e.g., actors, architects, economists, explorers, handicapped, murder victims).
Biological Abstracts indexes more than 4,300 journals internationally back to 1969. Biological Abstracts Archive 1926–1968 provides full retrospective coverage of the old volumes of the printed index.
Biological & Agricultural Index Plus covers over 380 journals from 1983 to the present, with full texts of over 100 starting in 1997. The print version of Biological & Agricultural Index covers back to 1964. Coverage includes agricultural chemicals, agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, agronomy, animal husbandry, animal sciences, bacteriology, biochemistry, biology, biotechnology, botany, conservation, cytology, dairying, ecology, entomology, environmental science, fishery science, food science, forestry, genetics, horticulture, immunology, limnology, livestock, marine biology, microbiology, mycology, nutrition, paleontology, pesticides, physiology, plant pathology, poultry, soil science, veterinary medicine, virology, weed sciences, wildlife management, and zoology.
Book Review Digest provides generous abstracts of reviews, or full texts in some cases, since 1983; it also includes citations for any book reviews appearing in any of over 5,000 journals. Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905–1982 provides 1.5 million evaluative passages from reviews of 300,000 older books. Access is provided not just by authors’ names and titles of their books but also through controlled subject headings. You can therefore search for reviews—and read many excerpts of them—simply by subject, without knowing in advance any specific authors or titles. This enables you to identify books by subject—either fiction or nonfiction (primarily in humanities and social sciences areas)—and at the same time to get substantive evaluations of them. (Doing subject searches for books in you library’s OPAC will identify relevant books but will not usually link you immediately to reviews or evaluations of them.) This is sometimes a good alternative to Amazon for quickly finding reviews of a book; these reviews all come from journals having editorial oversight. There is one major qualification to be aware of, however: the reviews indexed in these sources are almost all contemporary with the initial appearance of the reviewed book. For the scholarly literary criticism that may come much later you will need to check additional sources. (See the section on “Literary Criticism” in Chapter 14.)
Business Abstracts with Full Text is a continuation of the Wilson database as a separate file, not merged with Business Source Complete (below). It provides full texts of articles from more than 460 publications back to 1982, with indexing of 880 publications back to 1981. (The former Wilson Business Periodicals Retrospective 1913–1982 continues as a part of the separate database Applied Science & Business Periodicals Retrospective: 1913–1983). Coverage includes accounting, acquisitions and mergers, advertising, banking, building and construction, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, communications, computers, cosmetics industry, economics, electronics, engineering, entertainment industry, finance, financial data, government regulations, health care, hospitality and tourism, human resources, industrial relations, industry reports, insurance, international business, investment research reports, labor, management, market research reports, mass media, occupational safety and health, oil and gas, paper and pulp industries, personnel, public relations, public utilities, publishing, purchasing, real estate, retail trade, small business, specific business, specific industries, specific trades, SWOT analyses, taxation, technology, and transportation.
Business Source Complete is one of the very largest business databases; it indexes over 4,500 journals back to 1886, with full texts of about 2,400 of them (for recent decades). It also covers nonjournal full-text sources such as case studies, company profiles, conference proceedings, country reports, faculty seminar videos, financial data, industry reports, investment research reports, market research reports, monographs, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analyses, and trade publications. Additionally, the database provides biographical profiles of its 40,000 most cited authors. Citation searching (see Chapter 6) is possible within 1,300 of the journals covered. Smaller versions of the database are also available: Business Source Premier provides full texts of 2,200 journals, and Business Source Elite provides full texts of 1,000.
Canadian Reference Center offers full texts of leading Canadian magazines and newspapers, as well as biographical write-ups, maps, photos, and other images from Canadian Press.
Communication and Mass Media Complete indexes 800 titles as far back as 1915 (although primarily from the 1990s forward), with full texts of over 500 of them.
EconLit is the premier index to economic journals as well as books, essays in collective volumes, dissertations, working papers, and book reviews; its coverage extends back to 1969. EconLit with Full Text, also available, provides full texts of more than 560 of the journals.
Education Source indexes more than 2,300 journals, with full texts of over 1,700 of them and texts of over 550 books. It contains the former Wilson Education Index (and Abstract/Full Text) databases,and Education Index Retrospective: 1929–1983. Coverage includes administration and supervision, adult education, athletics, arts, classroom management, comparative and international education, competency-based education, computers in education, continuing education, counseling, distance education, education specialties, educational technology, elementary education, government funding, health and physical education, higher education, instructional media, language arts and linguistics, laptops in the classroom, library and information science, literacy standards, multicultural/ethnic education, multilingual education, parent–teacher relations, personnel service, physical education, policy, prayer in public schools, preschool education, psychology and mental health, religious education, science and mathematics, secondary education, social studies, special education, student counseling, teacher education and evaluation, teaching methods and curriculum, teacher’s unions, testing, and vocational education.
Energy & Power Source indexes nearly 1,500 publications dealing with coal, electric power, gas, nuclear reactors, petroleum, and renewable energy sources; aspects of these industries including exploration, extraction, clean-up, marketing, and sales are covered. Full texts of many of the sources are available.
Environment Complete indexes more than 2,400 journals internationally back to 1888, with current coverage of over 1,250 titles. Full texts of approximately 1,000 are searchable; 200 monographs are included. Coverage of the subject area is very broad: agriculture, renewable energy sources, marine sciences, geography, pollution and waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, and urban planning.
Essay and General Literature Index picks out essays appearing in book anthologies; it annually indexes more than 300 essay collections and 20 annual or serial publications. It covers back to 1985, indexing a total of over 86,000 essays in 7,000 anthologies or edited volumes. Essay and General Literature Index Retrospective: 1900–1984 covers an additional 249,000 essays back to the turn of the last century. Subjects covered include archaeology, architecture, art, children’s literature, classical studies, drama, economics, fiction, film, folklore, history, linguistics, music, poetry, political science, religion, and women’s studies.
Film & Television Literature Index provides indexing and abstracting coverage of 380 publications cover-to-cover, with another 250 indexed selectively. Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text offers the same coverage plus full texts of 120 journals and tens of thousands of photographs from the MPTV Image Archive.
FRANCIS is a huge index to more than 2,300 social sciences and humanities journals worldwide, in multiple languages (although with a French emphasis), back to 1972. Journals, books, dissertations, conference proceedings, and reports are covered. Subject headings are provided in both English and French.
FSTA—Food Science & Technology Abstracts covers over 4,600 publications back to 1969.
Hospitality & Tourism Complete is a full-text database covering 830 current periodicals with indexing coverage back to 1930.
Garden, Landscape & Horticulture Index provides abstract-level coverage of over 500 titles, mostly in English, mainly from the 1990s forward.
General Science Full Text covers 300 American and British journals and popular magazines from 1984 to the present with abstracts from 1993 forward with full texts of about 100 of the journals, starting in 1995. (The printed version of General Science Index covers back to 1978.) Subjects covered include anthropology, astronomy, atmospheric sciences, biological sciences, botany, chemistry, computers, earth sciences, environment and conservation, food and nutrition, genetics, mathematics, medicine and health, microbiology, oceanography, physics, physiology, psychology, pollution biology, and zoology.
GeoRef covers the world’s geosciences literature, indexing 3,500 journals back to 1669 for North America, and to 1933 from the rest of the world.
Humanities Source is a merger of the EBSCO Humanities International Complete database with the Wilson Humanities Index/Abstracts/Full Text/Retrospective. It indexes over 2,300 journals with full texts of more than 1,400 (and 700+ books). It includes full back files of the Wilson paper sets Humanities Index (1974–1984), Social Sciences and Humanities Index (1965–1974), and International Index (1907–1965). Subject coverage includes archaeology, area studies, art, classical studies, communications, dance, drama, film, folklore, gender studies, history, journalism, language and linguistics, literary and political/social criticism, music, performing arts, philosophy, religion, and theology.
Index to Jewish Periodicals covers more than 200 periodicals back to 1988.
Legal Source is a merger of the former EBSCO database Legal Collection with the Wilson files Index to Legal Periodicals and Books/Full Text/Retrospective: 1908–1981. Coverage includes full texts of more than 1,100 journals (including 300 law reviews) and 1,400 monographs per year from 1982 to the present, from the U.S., Puerto Rico, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Subject coverage includes administrative law, antitrust law, banking and business law, constitutional law, corporate law, court decisions, criminal law, domestic relations, energy and natural resources, environmental protection, estate planning, ethics, family law, federal law, food/drug/cosmetic law, insurance law, international law, Internet and information science law, intellectual property law, international law, Internet law, labor and human resource law, landlord/tenant law, legal librarianship, malpractice suits, maritime law, medicine and health care law, minorities, multinational corporations, negligence, nonprofit corporations, occupational health and safety, organized crime, patent and trademark law, probate, public law and politics, probate, product liability, real estate law, securities and antitrust legislation, sports and entertainment law, tax law and estate planning, and trade regulation.
LGBT Life indexes and abstracts more than 200 periodicals (130 full-text) and 330 reference works, with 170 full-text monographs and selective coverage of thousands of other sources.
Library & Information Science Source merges the EBSCO database LISTA with Full Text with the Wilson Library Literature & Information Science Index/Full Text/Retrospective: 1905–1983. Over 500 journals are indexed with full texts of more than 430 (and 30 books). Coverage includes automation, care and restoration of books, cataloging, censorship, circulation, classification, copyright, education for librarianship, employment, government aid, indexing, information brokers, Internet software, library associations and conferences, library equipment and supplies, library schools, literature for children and young adults, personnel administration, preservation of materials, public relations, publishing, online searching, public relations, publishing, rare books, reference services, and websites.
MEDLINE Complete is the largest full-text database for biomedical research. While there is a free version of MEDLINE on the open Internet (a Google or Bing search of its title will bring it up immediately), the free version does not have the 2,100 full-text journals provided in this subscription database. Some of the text coverage extends back to 1865.
Middle Eastern & Central Asian Studies covers academic and policy-related publications on the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa from 1900 to the present.
Military and Government Collection indexes over 400 journals, with over 300 full text, since 1962. It also includes full texts of the U.S. Government Printing Office’s Background Notes on Countries of the World.
MLA International Bibliography, from the Modern Language Association, is the largest database for literary studies; it also provides the best coverage of research in linguistics and folklore. It indexes 4,400 journals internationally back to the 1920s.
The Music Index Online is one of the best databases in its field, covering more than 480 periodicals internationally from 1970, with selective coverage of another 200. (The printed Music Index covers back to 1949.)
Philosopher’s Index provides abstracts of articles from more than 600 journals from 85 countries, back to 1940; it also indexes books, anthologies, and book reviews.
Political Science Complete indexes and abstracts 2,900 journals and offers full text of 550 of them. It also provides full texts of 340 reference books and 38,000 conference papers. Coverage is primarily from the 1990s forward, with some titles indexed in earlier decades.
PsycINFO, from the American Psychological Association (APA), is the largest database in its field. It indexes nearly 2,500 periodicals in 30 languages going back to the 1800s. It also covers books, anthologies, and dissertations. A related database, PsycARTICLES, provides full texts of 80 journals back to 1894; another, PsycBOOKS, provides full texts of 55,000 chapters from 3,500 books from current publishers and 2,600 “classic” books in the field dating from the 1600s. Thousands of signed articles from the 8-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology (APA and Oxford University Press, 2000) are also provided, full text. PsycCRITIQUES is a full-text database of over 40,000 book reviews dating back to 1956. PsycEXTRA provides full texts of “grey literature” not indexed in the other APA databases: technical, annual, and government reports, as well as newsletters, conference papers, and brochures. PsycTESTS provides full texts of many psychological tests.
Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature is an index to over 450 general newsstand type magazines and many scholarly journals, published in the United States (with a few Canadian titles) from 1983 forward. Readers’ Guide Full Text Mega adds abstracts since 1984 and full texts of 250 of the magazines since 1994; Readers’ Guide Full Text Select covers only those 250 journals, so it is a 100 percent full-text source. Readers’ Guide Retrospective: 1890–1982 indexes 550 U.S. magazines including everything in the old print volumes of both Readers’ Guide and Nineteenth Century Readers’ Guide. Subjects covered include aeronautics, African-Americans, aging, antiques, archaeology, arts, astronomy, automobiles, biography, business, Canada, children, computers, crafts, consumer education, current events and news, dance, drama, education, entertainment, environment, fashion, fiction, film and television, fine arts, food recipes and cooking, gardening, health and medicine, history, hobbies, home improvement, journalism, leisure activities, literature, medicine, music, nutrition, photography, politics, popular culture, religion, science, sports and fitness, television, transportation, and travel.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature indexes 11,000 journals internationally back to 1967, including selective coverage of music articles from thousands of nonmusic journals. Conference proceedings are covered back to 1835. RILM Retrospective Abstracts of Music Literature covers pre-1967 decades. RIPM Music Periodicals provides indexing and full texts of periodicals back to 1766.
Social Sciences Full Text indexes over 750 scholarly journals, with full texts of 330 of the as far back as 1972. Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907–1983 covers the print volumes of Social Sciences Index (1974–1983), Social Sciences and Humanities Index (1965–1974), and International Index (1907–1965). These databases cover addiction studies, anthropology, area studies, community health and medical care, communications, consumer affairs, corrections, criminal justice, criminology, economics, environmental studies, ethics, family studies, gender studies, geography, gerontology, human ecology, international relations, law, mass media, minority studies, nursing, pharmacology, planning and public administration, policy sciences, political science, psychiatry, psychology and psychological tests, public administration, public health and welfare, social work, sociology, and urban studies.
SocINDEX is a huge sociology database; it provides abstracts of articles from more than 1,300 core journals back to 1895, and selective indexing of approximately 3,000 others insofar as they have articles of sociological interest. Books, conference papers, and other sources are also covered. SocINDEX with Full Text adds full text of more than 890 of the journals back to 1908, and texts of more than 850 books and over 16,800 conference papers.
Textile Technology Complete indexes and abstracts more than 470 periodicals, with full texts of 50 of them. Books, conference papers, theses, and technical reports are also indexed, with full texts of 50 of the books. Coverage is primarily from the 1990s forward, but some titles are indexed from earlier decades.
Women’s Studies International is the largest general database in its field, covering over 800 sources primarily from 1972 forward (with some earlier years), It indexes journals, books, book chapters, newsletters, newspapers, proceedings, reports, grey literature, and websites.
ProQuest Databases
ProQuest, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is another of the major database vendors in the information field. It provides hundreds of databases (both indexing/abstracting and full text) available through its own search software and files from companies that it has bought or merged with (e.g., CSA Illumina, Dialog, DataStar, Chadwyck-Healey, HeritageQuest, UMI Microfilm, UPA Microforms), which may have search pages that look very different. From the wide range of ProQuest databases available, libraries must tailor their own subscriptions to fit their local budgets and the needs of their own clienteles. An important implication for students is that it doesn’t mean much to say simply “I searched ProQuest for my topic”—a comment heard frequently by reference librarians—because the set of ProQuest databases available in one library may be very different from the set subscribed to in another.
Some of the ProQuest databases have controlled descriptors; some are strictly keyword files. Among the many files3 offered by this company are the following:
ABI/INFORM Complete is one of the very best databases for business researchers. It indexes over 6,800 journals as far back as 1923 to the present and provides full texts of over 5,400 (including full text of The Wall Street Journal back to 1984), as well as full texts of thousands of annual reports, country reports, working papers, business cases and dissertations, and market/industry research reports (including Petrosil reports on the energy industry). New sources are being added continually. Smaller segmented editions of the database are also available: ABI/INFORM Global, ABI/INFORM Research, ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry, and ABI/INFORM Dateline.
Design and Applied Arts Index (DAAI) selectively indexes and abstracts more than 500 design and applied arts periodicals back to 1973. Coverage includes advertising, architecture, book design, ceramics, computer aided design, design history, education, glass, garden design, graphic design, fashion and clothing, furniture, illustration, interior design, jewelry, landscape architecture, metalsmithing, packaging, produce design, textiles, theater, urban design, Web design, and wood.
GeoRef is the best index for geology, covering sources for North America back to 1669 and for the rest of the world back to 1933. Currently more than 3,500 journals in 40 languages are indexed and abstracted; books, conference papers, theses, dissertations, and maps are also covered.
Index Islamicus covers over 3,000 journals, some extending back to 1906. It covers Islam, the Middle East, Muslim areas of Asian and Africa, and Muslim minorities elsewhere. Subject coverage is not just religious and geopolitical; also included are accounting, archaeology, arts bibliography, economics, education, geography, history, law, literature, natural and applied science, philosophy, social sciences, theology, travel, and zoology.
International Index to Music Periodicals indexes and abstracts about 450 music periodicals from 20 countries, primarily from 1996 forward but with some coverage extending back as far as 1874. It covers both scholarly and popular sources.
International Index to Performing Arts provides coverage of about 250 periodicals, primarily from 1998 forward but with retrospective coverage of some journals going back to their first issue. It covers the fields of “dance, film, television, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art and more.”
LISA: Library and Information Science Abstracts covers over 440 periodicals in more than 20 languages back to 1969.
PAIS International (1972– ) and PAIS Archive (1915–1976). The Public Affairs Information Service is the largest index to public policy and international relations journals, worldwide, from over 120 countries back to 1915. Over 4,100 journals are indexed. In addition to journal articles, the combined databases include books, government publications, grey literature, reports, conference papers, and websites. Note that newspapers and newsletters are not indexed here, but statistical sources are very well covered. Subjects include agriculture and forestry, banking and finance, culture and religion, economics, education, energy resources and policy, environment, government, health, human rights, labor issues, law and ethics, manufacturing, media and communications, military and defense policy, politics, population and demographics, science and technology, social conditions, trade, and transportation.
PolicyFile is an index primarily to think tank publications; it also covers studies done by nongovernmental organizations, research institutes, universities, and advocacy groups. More than 500 source groups are covered in over 75 public policy topic areas. While this is not a full-text database itself, in most cases it will link you to the full texts of the documents mounted on the sources’ own servers.
ProQuest Biological Science Collection indexes more than 1,500 periodicals back to 1982, with 750 of them full-text.
ProQuest Central is one of the very largest aggregations of full-text sources, indexing over 10,000 periodicals with most in full text. Beyond periodicals, over 1,000 U.S., Canadian, and international newspapers, 50,000 dissertations, and thousands of market reports covering 43 industries in 40 countries are provided. This one database is a combination of more than two dozen of the other ProQuest databases.
ProQuest Computer Science Collection provides more than 750 full-text journals back to 1981.
ProQuest Congressional is the best overall index to U.S. congressional hearings, reports, documents, prints, bills, laws, regulations, and some legislative histories; it is produced by CIS (Congressional Information Service), now a ProQuest subsidiary. Coverage of historical materials extends back to 1789 (full text U.S. Serial Set, Hearings, Bills and Resolutions as optional modules) or the early 1800s. Many libraries that subscribe to ProQuest Congressional without its full-text modules will nonetheless have microfiche sets of the texts of all of the hearings, reports, prints, documents, and legislative histories. (For more details on this database and its relatives see Chapter 13.)
ProQuest Criminal Justice abstracts and indexes 450 titles back to 1969, with about a hundred in full text.
ProQuest Environmental Science Collection provides full texts of 1,100 journals as far back as 1967, covering environmental science, pollution, water management, sustainability, and ecology.
Ethnic NewsWatch and Ethnic NewsWatch: A History (combined) provide full texts of over 340 publications (newspapers, magazines, and journals) from African American, Asian American, Jewish, Native American, Arab American, Eastern European, and other ethnic communities. Dozens of Latino publications are presented in Spanish. Coverage is from 1959 forward.
ProQuest Health and Medical Complete indexes over 1,950 publications from 1986 forward, with full texts of 1,660 of them.
ProQuest Military Collection indexes over 600 periodicals, with more than 400 full text. A few of the periodicals have extensive backfiles: Marine Corps Gazette back to 1916; Foreign Affairs to 1923; and Leatherneck to 1921.
ProQuest Newsstand indexes 1,370 U.S. and foreign newspapers, over 1,270 of which are full text; it is updated daily with some coverage far back as 1977. Major titles such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today are included. Controlled indexing descriptors cover subjects, individual companies or organizations, people, products (indexed by NAICS/SIC codes), geographic areas, and, generally, the who, what, why, where, and when topics of each article. The indexing standardization here is thus better than just the keyword search capabilities of many other newspaper sources. Regional “bundles” are available separately: Canadian, Latin American, U.S. Hispanic, Middle East, and Australia & New Zealand Newsstand, among many others. ProQuest International Newsstand provides full texts of about 660 papers since 1977 from around the world, also with controlled indexing descriptors. (The separate database ProQuest Historical Newspapers and Periodicals, which is only keyword-searchable, without any of these descriptors, will be discussed in Chapter 5.)
ProQuest Public Health indexes over 750 journals and provides full texts of over 520; coverage extends back to 1972. Newspapers, trade sources, reports, and dissertations are also covered in the subject areas of allergies and immunology, behavioral sciences, biology and genetics, biostatistics, communicable diseases, disaster preparedness, drug abuse and alcoholism, environmental health, epidemiology, nursing, nutrition, obesity, pediatrics, physical fitness, population studies, social services, special education and rehabilitation, and statistics.
ProQuest Religion provides full-text coverage of over 260 religion and theology journals, most in full text, from 1986 forward.
ProQuest Research Library is a kind of small “one-stop” database indexing over 5,000 titles in all subject areas, with over 3,600 in full text, from 1971 forward. It provides a good sampling of the core scholarly journals, newspapers, trade magazines, and general periodicals from the larger ProQuest family. Coverage is very broad. This is a good source for short term papers or general research that doesn’t require the depth of the other databases.
ProQuest Science Journals indexes over 1,600 journals, with full texts of more than 1,200 since 1986. All major fields—biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, earth sciences, engineering—are covered.
ProQuest Statistical Insight is the best starting point database for just about any kind of statistics. It indexes publications from hundreds of U.S. government agencies from 1973 (with full texts from 2004 forward); from 50 state governments and hundreds of private, commercial, and academic sources from 1980 (with full texts from 2008 forward); and from about a hundred international intergovernmental organizations from 1983 (with full texts from 2007). Many libraries have additional microfiche sets of all of the indexed documents. Over a million individually indexed tables can be searched in its Tables Collection. Data can be searched by any number of categorical breakdowns: geographic (by city, census division, county, foreign country, outlying area, region, SMSA, state, urban-rural and metro-nonmetro area); economic (by commodity, employment status, income, individual company or institution, industry, occupation); or demographic (by age, disease, educational attainment, marital status, race or ethnic group, sex).
Social Services Abstracts indexes and abstracts over 1,300 journals since 1979 in all areas of social work, including human services, social welfare, social policy, and community development.
Sociological Abstracts covers nearly 2,000 journals extending back to 1952. Books, chapters of anthologies, conference papers, and dissertations are also covered. Starting in 2002, many entries include not just abstracts of articles, but the full bibliographies that appear at the ends of the articles, with links to other CSA databases whose own entries cite these same footnoted articles.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts covers approximately 1,500 journals since 1975 in subject areas of international relations, law, and public policy. Two-thirds of the sources covered are published outside the United States. Like Sociological Abstracts, it provides “cited reference linking” of sources listed in the footnotes of the articles it indexes, from 2004 forward—i.e., it will bring to your attention articles in other CSA databases that make use of the same footnote sources.
The 600+ Dialog and DataStar databases that are now under the ProQuest corporate umbrella are especially thorough in covering current information, worldwide, in areas of aerospace, biomedical research, biotechnology, business and finance, chemicals, energy and development, food and agriculture, government regulations, intellectual property, medicine, news and media, pharmaceuticals, social sciences, and science and technology.4 Special libraries serving corporate, law, or scientific organizations that are particularly dependent on the most up-to-date and most specialized information are heavy users of these files. (ProQuest Dialog will remain as a collective designation; the name DataStar will disappear.)
Gale Cengage Databases
Some of the databases in this family offer a clickable “Browse Subjects” or “Subject Guide Search” option at the tops of their search screens; use of this entry point will provide you with cross-references and browse menus of subdivisions that can be very useful in alerting you to the best terms to use for your search. In other words, as with the EBSCO and ProQuest databases don’t just start typing in keywords as soon as you see the first search screen. You can often get much better results if you take a moment to familiarize yourself with the extra options available, especially on the “Advanced” search screens.
The Gale databases share what they call an “InfoTrac” platform and are sometimes referred to by this term, but remember that “InfoTrac” is not one big database—the designation covers a wide variety of individual titles, discussed below, and different libraries will have subscriptions to various databases within the family, depending on their clienteles.
Several of the more important Gale Cengage databases are listed here;5 others from the same company strictly keyword indexes (without indexing by descriptors) and will be discussed in Chapter 5.
Academic OneFile is a huge general database geared toward college and university users, covering all subject areas across humanities, social sciences, and science/technology fields. It indexes nearly 14,000 journals (more than 10,000 peer-reviewed) and provides full texts of more than 6,500 (3,200+ refereed) from roughly 1980 forward. It includes full-text coverage of The New York Times and the Times (London) back to 1985 and also provides transcripts of thousands of NPR, CNN, and CBC broadcasts.
General OneFile is another huge database, this one directed more towards a public library audience; it indexes over 13,000 journals, with full texts of more than 8,100. Hundreds of newspapers from about 1980 forward are also included. Seventy percent of the titles indexed are unique to this database, and there is only about a 30 percent overlap with the coverage of Academic OneFile. Transcripts of National Public Radio broadcasts from 1990 forward are searchable. An especially valuable feature is that it provides full texts of 3,000 (out of 6,000) of the journals recommended in Bowker’s Magazines for Libraries, a standard source used by libraries to identify the most important magazines and journals in all subject areas, that they may want to subscribe to.
Business Insights: Essentials (formerly Business and Company Resource Center) is a huge database of full-text sources (since 1980) including company profiles (with corporate parent/sibling relationships), industry rankings, product and brand information, company performance ratings, investment reports, market research reports, business rankings, corporate chronologies, industry statistics, current investment ratings, comprehensive financial overviews, financial ratios, pricing momentum and key ratio measures, industry newsletter news and analysis, and coverage of business events and trends. It also provides SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analyses on the most popular companies in the world.
Various Collection databases in particular subject areas include:
Each of these provides full-text access to journals within its field from 1980 to date. Coverage ranges from only a hundred or so titles (e.g., Gardening) to over a thousand (Nursing).
CPI.Q, or Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly, indexes 1,200 Canadian periodicals (English and French) from 1980, with full texts of 550 including the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s from 1983 forward.
LegalTrac indexes more than 1,500 periodicals, 200 of them full text, back to 1980. It covers law reviews, law journals, specialty law and bar association journals, legal newspapers, Federal and State Cases, and British Commonwealth and European Union Cases.
Literature Resource Center provides full-text access to thousands of literary biographies and interviews, including online versions of such major printed sources as Dictionary of Literary Biography and Contemporary Authors. It includes hundreds of thousands of full-text critical articles on particular literary works from various Gale reference sets and 360 journals. It also provides 30,000 full texts of contemporary poems, plays, and short stories.
FirstSearch Databases
The FirstSearch system is an aggregation of subscription databases6 made available by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in Dublin, Ohio.
WorldCat is a huge database that essentially combines the individual library catalogs of about 70,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories, including the records of three dozen national libraries. It lists not just books (in 479 languages), but also manuscripts, maps, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, posters, cuneiform clay tablets—just about any format imaginable, if it has been collected by a member institution. Library locations are given for almost all items. Although the records tend to use Library of Congress Subject Headings, there is great inconsistency in their application, since there are so many contributing catalogers of various skill levels. Usually keywords have to be used in addition to LCSH terms. (A free version is available at www.worldcat.org, but it is does not have the more sophisticated search capabilities of the subscription database.)
ArticleFirst is an index to 16,000 journals since 1990 in the areas of business, humanities, medicine, popular culture, science, social science, and technology.
Ebooks is a catalog of all of the electronic books cataloged by OCLC member libraries; it includes over 665,000 records.
OAIster is an index, with links to full texts, of open archive collections mounted by over 1,100 contributors worldwide. It indexes millions of digital journals, books, images, films, sound recordings, technical reports, and theses.
PapersFirst is an index to millions of individual papers from published conferences, symposia, expositions, and professional meetings, since 1993, insofar as they are collected by the British Library Document Supply Centre.
Scipio is an index to auction and sales catalogs covering art objects (furniture, jewelry, paintings, rugs, sculpture, textiles, etc.) and rare books; coverage extends back to the sixteenth century.
Miscellaneous Databases with Controlled Descriptors
Not all subscription databases are aggregated within services such as EBSCOhost, ProQuest, or Gale; your library may have many individual subscriptions to other files that are not included under these umbrellas. (Some of the titles listed above may also be available in your own library from different aggregators, which would change the search pages providing access to them.) Let me mention just a few more indexes to journals articles here because of their particular usefulness.
L’Annee Philologique (EBSCO) is the best database for Classical Studies (Greek and Roman antiquity); it covers 1,500 periodicals back to 1924. Although this database lacks controlled descriptor terms, it does allow searches to be limited by broad “Subjects and Disciplines” before you type in your keywords. And in any event, this file should be mentioned in conjunction with the medieval and modern history databases discussed next.
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance (University of Toronto) covers literature dealing with the period from a.d. 400 to 1700, indexing over 1,700 scholarly journals published since 1784, as well as books, encyclopedia articles, essays in collections (since 1874), conference proceedings, and dissertations. Iter can be searched not only by keywords, but also by Library of Congress Subject Headings and Dewey Decimal class numbers. Another good source covering much of this historical period is Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies (Brepolis Publishers), which includes two cross-searchable files, International Medieval Bibliography (IMB) and Bibliographie de Civilisation Médiévale. These cover the centuries from a.d. 300 to 1500 and index over 4,500 journals as well as tens of thousands of book reviews, essays in anthologies, festschriften, catalogs, conference papers, and monographs. (IMB covers only journals, essays within anthologies, and conference proceedings; it is the Bibliographie component that extends coverage to whole books.) The cross-file searching of these two databases enables you to limit subject searches to particular geographic areas and to particular centuries of interest. (Note the crucial distinctions: the “geographic” here refers to the subject coverage of the articles, not to their places of publication; similarly the “centuries” refers to the subject time-periods of the articles, not to their dates of publication.) Be sure to look for the “Advanced search” tab near the top of the screen to see these important options; the default “Simple search” screen does not bring them to your attention. And once you get the “Advanced search” screen, be sure to look for the additional line that says “More search possibilities: Click here”—this will bring up still more search boxes enabling you to use the databases’ controlled vocabulary much more efficiently, through “Browse” menus of subject headings with subdivisions.
(To step back for a moment, in surveying “history” literature in general, remember L’Annee Philologique for the ancient world, Iter and the Brepolis files for medieval and Renaissance periods, and a combination of America: History and Life [for United States and Canada] and Historical Abstracts [all other countries], the latter for periods from ca. 1450 to the present.)
Bibliography of Asian Studies, published by the Association for Asian Studies, is the best index to Western-language journals on this area of the world; it indexes over a half-million articles from 1971 forward primarily in humanities and social sciences areas and very selectively in sciences. (The print version extends back to 1941). Chapters in edited volumes and anthologies/festschriften are also indexed, as are conference papers. Coverage of dissertations and master’s theses is not good.
Bibliography of the History of Art is the largest database covering scholarly writings on the history of Western art, indexing over 1,200 journals up to the end of 2009. (This file, unlike most of the other discussed in this chapter, is freely available on the open Internet at http://library.getty.edu/bha.)
ERIC, from the Educational Resources Information Center, is a huge index to journal articles and research reports in the field of education; a corresponding microfiche set of the reports is available in many academic libraries. (This database, too, is now freely available on the Internet at www.eric.ed.gov; and the free site now includes many full texts of the reports.)
IBZ Online: International Bibliography of Periodical Literature. This is the online version of the printed index Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur; the database is available from K. G. Saur Verlag. While the print version began in 1886, the online version (as of this writing) starts in 1983. It indexes about 11,500 journals internationally (40 countries, 40 languages), although with a German emphasis (much as the FRANCIS database in the EBSCO system has a French emphasis). It focuses mainly on subjects in the humanities and social sciences. Subject headings are in both German and English.
How to Identify Databases in All Subject Areas
The best source for identifying which subscription databases exist in all subject areas is the annual printed directory Gale Directory of Databases (Gale Cengage); it lists both online sources and CD-ROMs (and other formats). An online version of this title is available through Gale Directory Library, which is itself a subscription database. Since the sources listed in this Directory are not freely available on the Web, however, your best bet is to check with the reference librarians of your own library to find out which subscriptions you have access to locally. When you talk to the librarians, however, do not just ask for particular databases; be sure to tell them the subject you are working on, or the information that you are ultimately trying to find, and ask them for recommendations on which files to search.
Cross-Disciplinary Searching and Federated Searching
One of most important concepts to remember in doing any kind of subject searching is that any database covers not just the subject indicated in its title but also other subjects from the perspective of that discipline (e.g., subjects such as Art, African Americans, communications, computers, developing countries, management, religion, shipwrecks, tea, women, et al.). (The same point applies to specialized encyclopedias, discussed in Chapter 1.) Virtually no subject is limited to a single index; rather, all the indexes may cover any subject, but from differing viewpoints.
Sometimes the cross-disciplinary potential of the various indexes (both online and printed) is surprising, as is shown in the following examples.
Articles under the descriptor Native Americans appear not just in Humanities Index and Social Sciences Index. The same topic is covered—confining ourselves just to the former Wilson indexes that are now (one way or another) EBSCO files—in all of the following:
An important qualification is in order, however: as of this writing, at least two other EBSCO/Wilson databases, Book Review Digest and Essay and General Literature Index, use the controlled heading Indians of North America rather than Native Americans.
Problems with Variant Search Terms
When more files are added the problem becomes much greater. To press the same inquiry into other databases (both controlled and keyword), you could also find material on the same subject in:
If you did a federated search of all of these files together using only Native Americans as your search term, you would miss most of what is covered by these latter databases—and you wouldn’t know that you’ve missed anything, since “all” of the databases were included in the federated search.
Of course, in most cases a researcher will not need to use the full range of perspectives on a topic such as American Indians and may be quite satisfied with what she finds in only Social Sciences Full Text, Humanities Source, or America: History and Life. Indeed, in most instances—particularly at the start of an inquiry—it is advisable to begin with the particular databases that provide the greatest disciplinary focus on the core literature of one’s subject area (e.g., Historical Abstracts, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts, etc.) rather than to do a federated or “discovery” search of as many files as possible, all at once.
Federated searching “across silos” is sometimes the best way to cover the same topic in multiple databases, but primarily if your topic has unusually distinctive keywords that do not admit of alternative phrasings and that are also unlikely to appear in unwanted contexts. I’ve had questions on the “Chimborazo” (a volcano in Ecuador), on “memsahibs” (wives of British colonial officials in India), on “nadaismo” (an artistic/cultural movement in Colombia in the 1950s and 1960s that spilled over into political protests), on “asbestos cleavage planes,” and on “batrachotoxin” (a kind of poison derived from South American frogs)—none of which were connected to controlled vocabulary terms, and all of which lent themselves to searches within multiple databases, with minimal appearances of the right word(s) in undesired contexts.
It is easy to misjudge how distinctive a particular keyword is, however. To return to an example from Chapter 2: if you search multiple databases at the same time for the name of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi (with a “G”) you will miss all of the records having the name spelled Qaddafi (with a “Q”). All of the elaborate mechanisms for “drilling down” within a federated set created by specifying only one of these spellings will not solve the basic problem of the lack of a cross-reference alerting you to the other form you didn’t think of. The bottom line: be very wary of “one-stop” or “seamless” searches. While they hold out the promise of showing you “the whole elephant” they may in fact still leave you in the situation of the Six Blind Men.
In pursuing cross-disciplinary inquiries I would emphasize in particular the complementary nature of literary, historical, and social sciences databases. For example, if you want information on French writers at the turn of the last century, don’t use just the MLA International Bibliography—try Historical Abstracts, FRANCIS, Dissertation Abstracts, Periodicals Index Online (covering 1665 to 1995), IBZ, and the Web of Science (covering 13,500+ journals in all subject areas, not just science). If you are searching in anthropology, don’t use just Anthropology Plus—try the MLA International Bibliography, Historical Abstracts, Social Sciences Index, Humanities Index, ATLA Religion Index, and the others just mentioned. The first rule is this: don’t confine yourself to only those databases that have your subject words in the title of the database. The second rule is this: it is usually better to search the disparate databases separately and individually, tailoring your terms to the peculiarities of each one, rather than to cover them simultaneously in a federated search. The third rule is this: talk to the reference librarians about which databases provide the best coverage for you topic; they may also be helpful in showing you how to find the best search terms.
Finding Which Journals Exist, Which Are Electronically Available, and Where They Are Indexed
Sometimes researchers just want to get an overview of which journals exist within a particular subject area. Sometimes they want to know where a particular journal can be found online. Sometimes they want to know where a particular journal indexed, especially if it is not available full text online. A number of sources, both electronic and printed, are useful in supplying this information:
If you’re going to be a good researcher, you have to remember that many journals are not available electronically, and many thousands are not indexed anywhere. Nevertheless, you may wish to be aware of the existence of the nonelectronic, and unindexed, serials in your field of interest, since the information in them may be of great value. To identify all of the journals being published in any subject area, use Ulrich’s in combination with The Standard Periodical Directory.
Identifying the Best Journals
To find out which periodicals are considered the best or the most important in their subject fields, use Magazines for Libraries (above). If your library subscribes to it, the Journal Citation Reports database from the Institute for Scientific Information, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, provides ranked listings of which journals in the sciences and social sciences are most heavily cited by other journals—a good indication of their importance. (As of this writing, however, humanities journals are not covered in this database.)
Thomson Reuter’s Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index also provide lists of which journals are indexed by each source, in broad subject categories. The titles within these subject areas are listed alphabetically, rather than in ranked order; but the mere fact that a journal is listed here to begin with means that it is very important in its area and is being frequently cited by other journals. These subject-category journal lists are available online at http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/. Click on the title of the database you want, then select the “View Subject Category” link to bring up the list of journal titles within each category.
Google Scholar has now introduced a ranking algorithm to identify its most important journals; a search on the phrase “Google Scholar metrics” will bring up the list.
Problems with Abbreviations of Journal Titles
One frustrating problem that researchers sometimes have with older serials is one that can usually be prevented with a bit of foresight; it concerns abbreviations of journal titles. Online indexes, as a rule, provide citations with full journal title information rather than abbreviations; but footnotes or bibliographies sometimes abbreviate the titles of the journals they cite. If all you have is an abbreviation, you may have considerable trouble in trying to look up the title in your library’s catalog or elsewhere (e.g., “Educ” can stand for “Education” or “Educational”; “Ann” can be “Annual” or “Annals”; “Com” can be “Community” or “Commerce”; “Res” can be “Resources” or “Research”; “Soc” can be “Society” or “Social”; and so on).7 The articles or prepositions that are left out can also cause problems. One researcher looking for Bull. Hist. Med. assumed that it meant Bulletin of Historical Medicine. It doesn’t—it’s Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Minor variations like these greatly complicate keyword searches.
A wise researcher, then, in copying or creating a journal citation, will never abbreviate the title of a journal. Never. The few extra seconds it takes to record the full title may save you hours of frustration at a later date—especially if you are looking for an article in a library other than the one in which you wrote down the citation.
There are, however, reference sources that will provide full titles of most journal abbreviations, and while they can solve many such problems, they won’t solve all of them, so it’s better to avoid creating the problem in the first place. The best sources for expanding abbreviated or incomplete journal title references are these:
The 1981 Change in Cataloging Rules for Serials
Another problem with serials is that there was a change in library cataloging rules as of 1981, and it still causes confusion today. In current practice, a journal such as Journal of the American Medical Association would be entered in a library catalog under just this title. Under the old rules, however, it would appear as American Medical Association. Journal. The old rule was that if the name of the society or organization appears in the title, then catalog the journal under the first word of the society name and not under the first word (e.g., Journal, Annals, Bulletin, Proceedings, etc.) of the title. Note the important distinction, however: the old rule applied only if the name of an organization appeared in the title; thus a form such as Journal of Medicine would file “as is,” but a form such as Journal of the Medicine Society would file as Medicine Society. Journal.
This distinction continues to cause much confusion in the search for old periodical titles, especially those that both began and ceased publication during the period before 1981, for it leads many researchers who look under the wrong entry form to conclude that a library does not own a particular serial when it actually is available. Compounding the problem is the fact that many journals that began publication prior to 1981 are still being published today—but if they were cataloged at the time of their initial appearance, the library’s record for that title may still be under the old form. This means that you may have to look under the old form of entry (under the organization’s name rather than under Journal or Proceedings) in order to find the call number for current years of the journal. The important point is that you need to be aware of the potential problem with this kind of journal title.
Let me take this opportunity to emphasize a more general rule: if you fail to find any title that you are looking for, under any circumstances, be sure to talk to the reference librarians. There are many tricks and exceptions to cataloging rules that are not obvious to nonlibrarians, so always talk to the reference staff whenever you have any problem in locating any item you have identified.