During the first week of term, I’m going to revisit some of my earlier posts, to remind you of some useful tools for philosophical research.  Today, I’ll be looking at databases.  All of the following can be located and accessed via HOLLIS, using your Harvard ID and PIN.  I will organize the list according to the classification scheme that I outlined last year.

Citation Databases

• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (and a note about an update.)
• Philosopher’s Index

Full-Text Archival Databases

• JSTOR (and a note about an update.)
  

Full-Text Current Databases

• POIESIS (and an update.)
  
• Project MUSE (and a note about an update.)
• Social Science Research (which includes the Humanities Research Network and the Philosophy Research Network)
• Science Direct
• Wiley Interscience (which includes the former Blackwell materials)

Hybrid Databases

• Academic Search Premier (and a note about an update.)

This list makes no claims to be exclusive or exhaustive.  These databases are merely the ones that you will most commonly use when doing philosophical research.  Depending on your area(s) of interest and study, you may want to consider other, more specialized databases as well, e.g., LexisNexis Academic, PubMed, or the Science Citation Index.  If so, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to direct you to them, and show you how to use them.

To let you know: Academic Search Premier has a new search interface.  The new look is much cleaner and less confusing than the version about which I described last summer.   The content of the search interface remains largely the same, with the addition of being able to search for cited references.

Please take a look at this new interface and let me know what you think of it.  Academic Search Premier is one of my favorite databases to use when doing philosophical research, and I’m hoping that the new interface will encourage others to use it more often.

Academic Search Premier

I’ve already reviewed Academic Search Premier (ASP) extensively, so I won’t say very much more about it. In addition to scholarly publications, ASP also holds a number of general interest publications that may be of use for pedagogical or research purposes.

Factiva

Though Factiva, a joint-venture between Dow Jones and Reuters, focuses primarily on business information, it is also a good source to turn to in order to find articles from journals and newspapers, as well as information from Web sites, news wire services, and transcripts.

Factiva’s search style is relatively easy to pick up, being a variant of Boolean searching, and clear examples of how to use the search language are provided. Searches can also be limited to a single source or several sources, by language, and by region.

If you are interested in learning more about how to use Factiva, please let me know. I may write a more detailed overview in the near future.

Lexis Nexis Academic

Recently redesigned and relaunched, Lexis Nexis Academic (LNA) is an excellent source for legal, government, and historical information, as well as for general news and interest publications.

LNA now offers two search options: the more basic Easy Search and the more advanced Power Search. Having done a few searches, it seems that they have made the searching process and dealing with results much friendlier and easier to deal with, unlike the older version.

As with Factiva, I’m very happy to show any who are interested how to use LNA, so please let me know. And I’ll consider a review of LNA as well.

Summary

These are just a few of the places in which to find general interest publications. But, remember that Harvard does not electronic access to many publications, even those of general interest, e.g., the New York Review of Books, or the London Review of Books, though we may get them in the future.

Thanks for reading! Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.

What it is

ASP “provides citations and abstracts for articles from over 4,140 journals, and includes full text from over 3,170 journals,” as the HOLLIS record notes.

Strengths

• Humanities & Social Sciences Emphasis — ASP’s focus is primarily in the humanities and social sciences, as well as popular publications like Time and Newsweek.

• Current Coverage — For the most part, ASP provides full-text of current issues of journals, i.e., those from the present back to the mid-1990s, and even earlier, in some cases. However, this is not always the case, as we see in the Limitation section.

Limitation

• Embargo on Current Issues – At the request of individual publishers, full-text of recent publications may be embargoed from release for a certain period of time (generally six to twelve months previous to the current date.) If this is the case, you will be able to retrieve a bibliographic record, but not the full-text, until the issue in question falls outside of the time-frame set by the publisher. The journals Inquiry and Philosophical Studies are examples of journals with a twelve-month embargo on current issues.

Using Academic Search Premier

ASP has three search screens. Two of these, the Basic Search and the Advanced Search, are most relevant for philosophy-related research.

Below the tabs for the three search screens are six sub-tabs: Keyword, Publications, Subject Terms, Cited References, Indexes, and Images. We’ll look at the first five of these below, once I’ve gone over how to use the Advanced Search Screen.

As noted above, there are two search screens that most concern us here:

• The Basic Search, as with many databases, is useful for general, broad searches.

• The Advanced Search, which is the default search screen, is the one that I recommend using, since it gives you better control over the search with the use of limiters. Several things to note about the Advanced Search:
  • Default Search — The default search searches only the title, abstract, subject headings, and author fields. It does not search full-text unless you set the search box drop-down menu to “TX All Text.”
  • Refine Search Box – The Refine Search box under the search fields is very helpful, and I recommend using it when setting up searches.
    • Checking off the “Full Text” box will return only full-text articles.
    • Checking off the “Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals” box will eliminate popular publications, limiting the search to only academic journals.
    • The “Publication Type” and “Document Type” menus are also useful — setting the former to “periodical” and the latter to “article” can sometimes eliminate things like book reviews and other potentially irrelevant items.
  • One thing about which to be careful: In the “Refine Search” area, there are two “Reset” buttons, positioned in places where, in other databases, you might expect a “Search” button. Be careful to not click these unless you want to modify your search. It’s an annoying quirk of ASP that these buttons are placed where they are, and that the “Search” button is not more prominently displayed.

• Sub-tab Searching – I mentioned above that there are six sub-tabs under the Basic and Advanced Search Tabs. We’ll look at the first five of these, as they are most relevant for our needs.
  • Keyword — This is the default search option, using words and phrases entered into the search boxes.
  • Publications – If you want to see if a journal is in ASP, or if full-text is available, you have the option to search for the journal, or to browse through an alphabetical list, in order to view the complete bibliographic record.
  • Subject Terms — Subject term searching can be very useful in searching. ASP has an extensive thesaurus of subject terms that are linked to the records in the database. These terms can be used as limiters in a search, e.g., searching “reasons” and “desires” in “TX All Text,” and “philosophy” in “SU Subject Terms”. Or, you can browse through the subject terms, to see what articles are linked to them. You also have the option of exploding term, i.e., expanding it to the next higher term in the subject hierarchy, if you are returning too few results with a narrow term.
  • Cited References — Use this option to see how many times an article or author has been cited in other articles in ASP. This can help you determine which articles are more relevant or important to certain topics.
    
  • Indexes – If you would like to see how many articles by an author are in ASP, use this option. In “Browse an Index,” choose “Author;” enter in a name (last first, then initial or full first name), and click “Browse.” You’ll be able to add the author to your search, if you’d like to do so.

In Summary

• ASP is an excellent database in which to find current issues of journals.
• It is best used in conjunction with databases like JSTOR, Synergy, and Project MUSE, to cover a wide range of current and classic articles and journal issues.

Next week’s database review will examine Synergy, the platform used to access Blackwell’s journals.