INFORMATION LITERACY :
DATABASES :
INTERNET: SEARCH: TOOLS :
RESEARCH: TECHNIQUES :
EDITORIAL:
The Power of Databases for Scholarly Research and
Provision of Full Text Output



The post below is my response to statements regarding use of search
engines as opposed to databases by another poster. The poster who left
college three years ago found search engines more effective than databases
at getting to periodical article citations that could actually be found in
full text. It is my view that much has changed since then and that
databases have a number of characteristics that make them the place of
choice for much of the finding of quality research sources that students
need for their term papers, and other assignments.



Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 16:44:48 -0500 (EST)
From: David P. Dillard <jwne@...>
To: EDTECH - Educational Technology <EDTECH@...>
Subject: Re: For College Students Time Management is Biggest Research Issue,
says ProQuest Study




Re: For College Students Time Management is Biggest Research Issue, says
ProQuest Study


> My own experience has been that Google more often that not is the first place
> I want to look. It's been three years since I finished my educational
> technology master's. At that time, in the field of educational technology, I
> found that the web resources I could access through Google and
> Scholar.google.com were superior to the databases provided by my local state
> university. The biggest stone wall I ran into were articles from obscure
> journals that were not available online and not subscribed to by the
> university.


<http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=
EDTECH&month=0711&week=a&msg=YFa8CpY9RUMIuRYeR0/lPA&user=&pw=>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2wxfeq>


-----------------------------------


Let us think about this.


Using databases for research topics is very often far more effective than the
use of internet search engines like Google to find sources pertinent to a
research topic.


There are several factors to be considered at the present time regarding output
of databases in terms of journals found and access to the articles of these
journals at a major college or univerisity. Much has changed even in three
years.

First of all, if ones college does not have a journal, interlibrary loan (ILL)
can be used to find the journal at another library and mostly now a .PDF of the
article needed is emailed to the original requester who needs the article.
There is usually no charge for ILL services. Secondly, in more fields and by a
greater number of college faculty, scholarly and even peer reviewed or refereed
articles are part or all of the required literature a student may use for their
term paper sources. Such sources are more readily found in databases and in a
specific group of these, not all databases.


Secondly, the availability of full text in databases themselves is greatly
increased year by year and there are databases in databanks like EBSCO,
ProQuest Direct, OVID and others that include extensive full text of journal
articles. There are also journal aggregating services that archive the full
text of journal articles and are searchable much like a database and these
include services like JSTOR and MUSE. Libraries are rapidly adopting tools
like journal finders and link resolvers that will take the user of a database
from an article citation to the call number of a print version of a journal or
to the database and record in that database online so that the reader sitting
at home lets say at three o'clock in the morning, can view that article sitting
at their computer. Furthermore, libraries subscribe to services that provide
access to the journals of a specific publisher directly to facilitate viewing
the full text online of some or all of that publisher's journals including
publishers like Oxford University Press, Sage Publications, Springer, Elsevier
and many more. Indeed, Temple University Libraries subscribes to over 40,000
journals full text online and this is anything but unique at Temple in
comparison with other institutions of higher education.


Google and Google Scholar do not necessarily provide easier access to full
text. If one is working on a college computer or through a proxy server method
from home, the user may get into a journal article through Google because their
college library subscribes to that journal, but otherwise there will be no
access to the full text. Hence, even though Google Scholar provides access to
the article citations and abstracts found in JSTOR, Muse and Sciecne Direct,
there is no public access to the full article. At home I have Mozilla Firefox
set up to log into my Temple account and serve as a proxy, whereas Internet
Explorer goes directly to a site from my ISP at home. I can read any full
article free using Mozilla from all three of these databases but cannot do the
same from IE. Hence Google does not really get the user to as much full text
as the library search tools and online journal subscriptions do.


In EBSCO, the database Sports Discus seems to find some very esoteric
periodicals to cover and is a good example of the kind of source material
Bruce Moon was referring to. First of all, covering some of the same
intellectual territory is the CSA database Physical Education Index, but
Physical Education Index seems to have a much larger body of more readily found
journals than SportsDiscus. Hence one factor that reduces the finding of
esoteric unfindable journals has to do with database selection for the
searching one is doing for articles that support their research.
Secondly EBSCO came out with a new version of SportsDiscus that has the full
text articles from selected journals so that there is now a lower percentage of
these tough to find the articles esoteric journals in that database.

The use of Google is actually much harder for a complex topic as the search
interface is very limited.

In EBSCO, OVID, CSA, First Search, Dialog and Datastar, amongst others, one can
do various individual search steps and combine them in various ways while
limiting search terms to subject heading or title in some of the combinations
to get a very precisely relevant group of citations on a rather complex topic.
Google most effectively combines with and only, or combinations done according
to their guide procedures, seem to be quite inacurate in my experience. In the
databanks listed above one may search for words within so many words of each
other as specified by the searcher either on the same side of each other or
flipped so that the first word could be found up to say six words apart from
the other word and they can be in either word order. In Google one may only
search for exact phrases by placeing a group of words in quotation marks.

In EBSCO databases one may search for example, for a word within eight words of
another other word. Hence a search of

literature n8 review*

in EBSCO will find all of these possible phrasings and many more:


literature review

literature reviews [the asterisk at the end of review allows for variant
endings like review, reviews, reviewing].

review of the literature

review of the most significant and important literature.

Databanks facilitate sending groups of documents to ones email ranging from 30
records at one send in one system to 500 records at one time in another, much
more convenient than working with one citation at a time in Google and other
search engines.

It is my considered view that databases are far more effective as quality
research tools than Google and the other search engines for the reasons cited
above and in particular the need to work with each document individually as
opposed to sending the whole group to ones email, scanning them and dealing
with the sources that are the most pertinent.


More may be seen regarding databases and their uses at this URL:


<http://tinyurl.com/273rye>


Also of interest in this regard:


EDUCATION: COLLEGE: STUDENTS :
TIME MANAGEMENT:
For College Students Time Management is Biggest Research Issue,
says ProQuest Study
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/20916>


Also important in this regard is a large body of discussion spanning a
wide range of time having to do with the hidden web regarding which Gary
Price is just one of the experts.


Net-Gold on the Hidden Web

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/msearch?query=%
22hidden+web%22&submit=Search&charset=windows-1252>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/yqpvv7>


ResourceShelf on the Hidden Web
<http://www.resourceshelf.com/index.php?s=hidden+web>


ResourceShelf on the Invisible Web
<http://www.resourceshelf.com/index.php?s=invisible+web>


Google Scholar on the Invisible Web
<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?
hl=en&q=%22invisible+web%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=ws>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/yuwttw>


Google Scholar on the Hidden Web
<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=
en&lr=&q=%22hidden+web%22&btnG=Search>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2chh8y>



Google Books on the Hidden Web
<http://books.google.com/books?tab=sp&sa=
N&hl=en&lr=&q=%22hidden+web%22&btnG=Search>



Google Books on the Invisible Web
<http://books.google.com/books?lr=&q=%
22invisible+web%22&btnG=Search+Books>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2gyam6>


Scirus on Invisible Web or Hidden Web from Journal Sources and Preferred
Web Sources


Searched for:: :The exact phrase:"hidden web" OR ("invisible web")

Found:: :341 total | 57 journal results | 284 preferred web results | 0
other web results


<http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=%22hidden+web%
22+OR+%28%22invisible+web%22%29&ds=jnl&ds=nom&t=phrase&g=s&t=all>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2c7g8c>



Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@...
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