LIS521 Janes

Resource Set 3

Sources About Serials

Bibliographic Databases: General-Purpose & Specialized; Serials qua Serials

Explore the following sources (and similar ones from the textbook or other sources), paying special attention to their intents, potential uses, how they are structured and searched. Use the questions that follow as guides to your thinking about how each of these might be used for those questions, and consider potential sources for each question. On this Catalyst tool, suggest the source you think might be the best, first place to begin; we’ll discuss these in class.

• UW Libraries: by Subject, Alpha by file name
• LexisNexis Academic
• Web of Science (citation indexes) (also have a look at the Journal Citation Reports)
• Google Scholar
• SCOPUS
• Ulrichsweb (was Ulrich's international periodicals directory)

These are all corporate sites for major database vendors, not links to search, use UW Libraries Databases page for that

• EBSCO
• ProQuest (formerly UMI, Bell & Howell)
• OCLC FirstSearch
• Wolters Kluwer Ovid
• Thomson Reuters, inc former ISI (Institute for Scientific Information)
• Gale Cengage Group
• Wilson (as part of EBSCO)
• Lexis-Nexis
• Dialog

• Summon (Serials Solutions)

1. Do smart people suffer from insomnia more?

2. Can you find me reviews of performances of Chess?

3. Are there many geographers using methodological individualism?

4. I found an article in Early Childhood Research Quarterly for my paper, but I need to know if it’s scientific.

5. How many times has Robert Taylor’s 1966 article in College & Research Libraries been cited?

Then, do a little reading, think about these, and be prepared to discuss them in class:

Walker & Janes Online Retrieval: A Dialogue of Theory and Practice, chapters 7, 8, (PDF) 1998.

Head & Eisenberg, Assigning Inquiry: How Handouts for Research Assignments Guide Today’s College Students Project Information Literacy 2010 (pdf)

And prepare to discuss these questions:

v What are these resources for? What’s the purpose or motivation for resources such as these?

v How would you decide which database to search for a given need?

v You’ve got 60 seconds to describe the use of value of citation searching to someone who’s unfamiliar with it. What do you say? And what might you use the Journal Citation Reports for?

v What do people in the profession think about Summon?

v Why has DIALOG faltered?