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.

 

 

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

 

 

  

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.

8 surprising things I learnt about Google Scholar

Why nested Boolean search statements may not work as well as they did

 

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’s your opinion of Google Scholar’s uses and drawbacks?

 

v  What do you think is the likely future value of “traditional” Boolean searching, and what factors will help to determine what that future will be?