|
General/Interdisciplinary
Databases | Subject-Specific Databases
| Citation Databases | So
what should I use?
You are not going to want to search all of the databases. Instead
you are going to want to consider the scope and coverage of
individual databases to determine which ones suit your needs.
Below are general descriptions of types of databases.
General/Interdisciplinary Databases
Databases such as Academic
Search Premier, Expanded
Academic ASAP, PerAbs
Periodical Abstracts, and Wilson
SelectPlus all offer access to a broad range of both magazine
and journal articles.
Advantages:
- All of the databases offer some to all of the articles
indexed in their entirety, a.k.a. in full text. Whether
a particular article is available full text has no bearing
on it's quality. Some publishers sell the rights to the
articles to virtually all databases, some sell only to a
particular database, and some won't sell the rights at all.
- You can pick up articles from a wide variety of disciplines
in the general databases, which may offer very different
perspectives to the same topic, depending on what your topic
is.
- The core news magazines and scholarly journals are almost
always present in the general databases, though they may
just be indexed and not presented in full text format.
Disadvantages:
- There usually aren't very many limiters you can utilize.
They aren't going to analyze
the article to the depth of telling you if it is a review
article, a research article, etc.
- The citations are limited to periodicals. Relevant chapters
from books won't be included.
- Subject headings vary in quality and consistency, and
they don't offer much depth for a particular discipline.
- The number of periodicals indexed is rather shallow if
compared to a subject-specific database.
Subject-Specific Databases
On the opposite end of the spectrum there are subject-specific
databases.
Advantages:
- Tailored to a particular discipline: business (ABI-INFORM);
criminal justice (Criminal
Justice Abstracts); economics (EconLit);
education (ERIC);
environmental sciences (LexisNexis
Environmental); literature (MLA
International Bibliography); medicine (MEDLINE);
philosophy (Philosopher's
Index); political science (Worldwide
Political Science Abstracts); psychology (PsycINFO);
social work (Social
Services Abstracts); sociology (Sociological
Abstracts); U.S. history (America:
History & Life); world history (Historical
Abstracts); etc.
- Usually attempts to be comprehensive, indexing as many
relevant journals and other sources as possible for that
discipline.
- Indexing itself usually attempts to offer depth: sophisticated
subject headings, descriptions of what kind of article it
is (review, research, clinical trial, etc.), who the audience
is for the article. And therefore the database interfaces
offer lots of different ways of limiting your search.
- Usually doesn't just index journal articles, but includes
other useful sources like dissertations, books and the chapters
within books, and sometimes papers presented at conferences.
- Includes historical coverage, since usually goes back
to the mid 1960s.
Disadvantages:
- Though there are exceptions, there usually are no full
text articles available. All you get is a citation and most
of the time a summary of the source.
- Can easily be overwhelmed by the number of results if
you type in general words. You will need to be fairly specific
in what you are looking for.
- The comprehensiveness of the database will pull up citations
from some obscure journals and other resources that may
prove difficult to actually get your hands on, not to mention
materials in other languages.
Citation Databases
There's another series of databases that cover broad categories
as well: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science
Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index.
All of them are produced by the ISI or Institute for Scientific
Information and available in the database called Web
of Science. These citation indexes are much more comprehensive
than the Wilson ones in terms of the number of journals indexed.
However, the articles are not analyzed and given subject headings
and abstracted by the index producers. (If there is a summary
of the article and keywords given, they were in the original
article and the producers just copied that information.) Instead
the index analyzes the citations within the article, so one
can figure out who is citing whom in their research.
Advantages:
- Very large collection of scholarly journals included in
the indexing.
- Only source that analyzes the citations. Can sort the
results list by number of times cited, so the articles that
were the most popular rise to the top.
- Does do some analysis of the type of article (book review,
editorial, news item, etc.). One can't tell what type of
research article it is, but one can at least eliminate those
things that aren't research articles.
- Can view the citations themselves in brief format. If
there's a record for the particular citation, it will be
hyperlinked.
- Wonderful source for finding scholarly book reviews.
Disadvantages:
- No full text articles.
- Online version only goes back to 1987. We have Arts
& Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences
Citation Index back to the 1970s, but we don't have
Science Citation Index in print. (Note: Print version
extremely difficult to use; not intuitive at all.)
- Many times there is no abstract or descriptors for the
article. The indexers have not created consistent subject
headings. All you get is the title of the article, author(s),
and where it's published. Which means that your keywords
will have to be in the title of the article in order for
a relevant record to appear. This works fine for the sciences,
since the article titles tend to be self-explanatory and
have all the unique words in them. Doesn't work so well
for the humanities.
- Strength of the citation indexes is really in the sciences.
Humanities is kind of more of an afterthought to the producers,
since citation analysis apparently isn't as important to
scholars in the humanities.
So What Should I Use?
What kind of database you want to use depends on what kind
of research you want to do.
I just need a few recent articles on my topic.
Try a general/interdisciplinary database that has some full
text articles.
I want to do a comprehensive search for articles on my topic.
Try one or more subject-specific database. You should be
able to research back to the 1960s and hundreds to thousands
of sources are included.
I want to find the key articles on my topic.
Try one of the citation indexes and sort the result list
by "times cited." (This option is at the top right
of the search results screen in Web of Science.)
|
