Robbins Library Notes

Good afternoon! Today, I’ll be reviewing Philosopher’s Index, a critical resource for research in philosophy. Harvard recently switched from the OVID SilverPlatter interface to CSA Illumina’s interface, which promises to be much friendlier to use.

What it is

The E-resource description notes that “Philosopher’s Index is the major indexing source for scholarly research in philosophy. It contains several hundred thousand bibliographic citations, with author abstracts for many of the citations. The database gives bibliographic information for journal articles and major articles from anthologies and books published since 1940. The articles covered in here are written in English, Spanish, German, Italian, and French, coming from more than 480 journals from 38 countries. Topics covered include all major fields of philosophy, including: aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, existentialism, logic (including mathematics), metaphysics, phenomenology, political philosophy (including philosophy of law), social philosophy, and philosophy of education, history, language, mind, science and religion.”

Strengths

• Philosopher’s Index is limited solely to philosophy and philosophy publications and books.
• It covers a wide number of publications in multiple languages back to 1940.
• The new CSA Illumina interface allows for easier and more focused searching. It is less cluttered in its presentation, and allows for more flexible and focused searching than the OVID platform.

Limitations

• Philosopher’s Index is a citation database — thus, there is no full-text available from the database, though you will be able to link to full-text (where available) and HOLLIS records using the “Find it @ Harvard” button —
• Older records tend to have less information, e.g. no abstract, less bibliographic information, etc., which may make searching for older records a bit more difficult.
• Also, materials before 1940 are not included in the Index. For these articles, you may need to use another citation database, such as Arts & Humanities Citation Index, which does go back to the turn of the twentieth century.
• The Index does not tell you how many times an article has been cited elsewhere. For that, you will need to look at Academic Search Premier or Arts & Humanities Citation Index.
• The records in the Index are not perfect, in terms of having complete, full, and accurate information for every record. Furthermore, it does not contain every record of every philosophical article every printed in the last century or so. Coverage, as noted above, gets a bit spotty the farther back you search.
• Finally, given that updates are released quarterly, it is usually a quarter or two behind what is actually published, e.g., July articles will not be found in the database until the Quarter 3 edition is released, usually late in the year.

Using Philosopher’s Index

1. Go to the HOLLIS search page, and select the “Digital Resources” tab.
2. Set the “Search type” to “Title beginning with,” and the search terms to “philosopher’s index”
3. In the results list, scroll down to the entry, “Philosopher’s index (Online: SilverPlatter),” and click on this link. The HOLLIS record has not been updated yet to reflect the new vendor.
4. Clink on the Internet link in the record, and login with your ID and PIN
5. When you reach the Philosopher’s Index home page, the default search is the basic “Quick Search” Screen, as seen on the first slide of the attached PDF file. Go to the “Advanced Search” tab and select that.
6. In the Advanced Search screen, you’ll have several options to set up your search, as you can see in the second slide of the attached PDF file. I’ve run an example to show you how an initial search, which we will go back and modify.
   1. I have become interested recently in the philosophy of personalism, a framework outlined by the early twentieth century French philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier. I’m curious to see what work of his can be found in Philosopher’s Index. So, getting to the Advanced Search screen, I enter in “personalism,” and set it the search to look for this term in the Descriptor field. I also enter in “mounier,” but, since I’m not sure that his name will be used as a descriptor, I leave the search to look for the term in any field. At present, I don’t set any limiters, because I want to get as many references as I can for my initial search. (All this is in the third slide of the attached PDF file.)
   2. I click on “Search,” and get nineteen results. Note that the CSA Illumina interface lists all nineteen at once, but then sorts them out into several sub-categories: [All] Journals, Peer-Reviewed Journals, and Books. (There is also a Chapter/Section sub-category, which does not appear in my search results.) From there, I can look at the listings under each tab, to see what turns up. (You can see this in the fourth slide of the attached PDF file.) Also note that each record gives a short bit of bibliographic information, lists a short abstract, and gives the list of descriptors for each record. And, unlike the old OVID platform, there is no search screen taking up three-quarters of the page.
   3. But, now, I want to refine my search a bit. So, heading up to the “Edit Search” link, just under and to the right of the reddish-brown “Browse” tab towards the top of the screen, I click on that. (I’ve circled this in the fourth slide as well.) As you can see on the fifth slide, there are several options available to me by which I can modify my search. I can add or remove rows to my search — which I won’t do now — I can change the date range — which I also won’t do — along with limiting my results to the latest update only (i.e., to the most recent quarter available.), including only journal articles (which I will check off), and limiting results only to English only (which I will also check off.) There is the option to change the database, but I won’t do that at present. Finally, I’ll set the search to show me the full record of each hit, and to list fifty records per page, mostly because scrolling through multiple pages listing only ten records at a time is about as much fun as watching paint dry. Click on “Search,” and you’ll see the results on the sixth page of the PDF file.
   4. From any of these results screen, I can click on in a record, and link either to the HOLLIS record or to the full-text, if available.
7. Search Tools – This version of Philosopher’s Index gives you three Search Tools, which may be of use to your searching. Click on the purple “Search Tools” tab towards the top of the page to access these. There is no Thesaurus searching in this version of the Index, so we will ignore that tab.
   1. History/Combine Searches — As you can see on the seventh slide, Philosopher’s Index keeps a history of your searches. Here, you can combine some or all of your search strategies to do larger searches.
   2. Command Search — The Command Search allows you to write your own Boolean searches, as seen on the eighth slide. This version of the Index gives you the code to write in so that you can set up your searches.
   3. Indexes –Philosopher’s Index gives you the option to search indexes for authors, journal titles, descriptors, and publication type, as seen on the ninth slide. These can be very useful if you want to see what a particular person has published, for instance, or to see what writings exist on a particular topic.
8. The “Browse” tab lists only social science journals published by SAGE Publications, and is generally not as relevant for philosophy as the other tabs are.

Summary

In general, Philosopher’s Index is the best place to start when you are looking for bibliographic information, to generate a list of resources about a person or topic, or to see what an author has published. Furthermore, the new CSA Illumina interface is much easier to use and navigate than the previous OVID SilverPlatter interface.

However, given the database’s limitations, it is generally a good idea to combine a search in Philosopher’s Index with one in Arts & Humanities Citation Index, or another such citation database.

Next week, I’ll look at Arts & Humanities Citation Index for my weekly review. As always, if you have a database that you’d like me to review, please let me know.