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.

Readers who are curious about the SSRN might find this article by Noam Cohen from the New York Times about the SSRN to be of interest. Here is the introduction:

FIRST came the Amazon book rankings, and word leaked out that perhaps some vaunted writers spent more time than you would think checking how popular they were, hour by hour. Then newspapers started tracking the most popular articles on their sites and journalists, it was said, spent more time than you would think watching their rankings, hour by hour.

But would you believe that academics could become caught up in such petty, vain competition? Of course, you say. Still, short of hanging out in the stacks at the library and peeking over shoulders, the pursuit of that particular vanity had to wait for the Internet, and the creation of the Social Science Research Network, an increasingly influential site that now offers nearly 150,000 full-text documents for downloading.

Not surprisingly, there are some big questions raised by the SSRN about quality control and the worth of the materials posted therein:

The research network raises the same big questions about what is lost and what is gained by removing the barriers to being heard in the public square. Is music distributed on MySpace, without benefit of a record label’s guiding hand, better or worse? Is journalism helped by the wide reach of bloggers, or hurt as professionalism disappears? Is it good that research that has not been reviewed by peers can be found so easily and looks just the same as gold-star approved work?

Do readers have an opinion on this subject? What do they think of the quality of the materials on the SSRN?
A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.

Dear Colleagues,

You might be interested to know about a new venture that we have a hand in, the Philosophy Research Network (PRN). We hope you will find it as promising for pursuing philosophical work as we do.

PRN represents an expansion of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). SSRN is a massive website started 10 years ago or so by scholars in law, economics, business and so forth. It is a place for scholars to post working papers (free of charge) so that those dealing with related topics can locate and download them (also free of charge). It thus consolidates and organizes the sort of electronic exchanges that already occur via e-mail or through private websites. Users can find related work through title, keyword, abstract, and author searches; they can also receive email announcements of new postings in their areas of interest.

SSRN currently hosts around 160,000 papers; downloads are currently running at around 4 million papers per year. In short, this service is a big success in the social sciences. PRN promises to be an equally useful resource.

We invite you to post your work in progress on PRN. You’ll need a pdf version of the papers you want to post, and an abstract of each that you can cut and paste into a text box during the posting process. (SSRN provides a link to a site that lets you create pdfs without cost.) Most of the papers now on PRN are cross-listed from pre-existing networks within SSRN – law, economics, etc. This will change as philosophers add their own papers.

To see an example, click on the link below for David Velleman’s author page.

 
The email service announcing new postings in each subject area – called ‘journals’ – will be launched soon. Free trial subscriptions will be available, and we hope you will encourage your university to obtain a site license.

PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH NETWORK

To view all subject areas, click on this link: http://www.ssrn.com/update/prn-/prn_jrl.html

To view all the papers in the Philosophy Research Network:  
To find general information about the network and posting: http://ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html

Signing on the first time takes a few minutes, but after that it’s very easy. Your papers can be found on your own personal page (created automatically when you post a paper), by searching the SSRN site, and by perusing the subject matter areas in which you list them.

The network does very light screening to exclude non-scholarly material and to refine the classification of papers. Otherwise there is no peer review, and this posting does not amount to a publication. It is solely for facilitating communication among philosophers. Posting on PRN is similar to circulating work in progress at conferences, among friends, or through a personal web page.

SSRN is mostly a site for working papers, but you can post published papers there as well, as long as you have not given away electronic rights.

One caveat: Authors in other fields will sometimes classify their papers for PRN, not always appropriately. We are working on that problem, but please expect some amount of imperfection in this process.

We look forward to seeing your posts on PRN.

Lawrence C. Becker
Fellow, Hollins University

Brie Gertler
Department of Philosophy
University of Virginia

PRN Advisory Board

Julia Annas, Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona

David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy, ARC Federation Fellow, and Director of the Center for Consciousness, Australian National University

Maudemarie Clark, Carleton Professor of Philosophy, Colgate University

Christine Korsgaard, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University

A. John Simmons, Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Elliott Sober, Hans Reichenbach Professor of Philosophy and William F. Vilas Research Professor, University of Wisconsin

Ernest Sosa, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University

Brian Weatherson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University

The new clearinghouse is named the Humanities Research Network (HRN), and, according to the press release, the hope is that HRN will “become a comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship.” At present, the directors of the HRN Philosophy Research Network are Lawrence Becker (Hollins University) and Brie Gertler (University of Virginia).

HRN, like the Social Sciences Research Network, posts drafts of works-in-progress, along with finished papers, all of which can be downloaded for free. Furthermore, the coverage of philosophical topics is quite broad, which should suit the interests of many in the department. (To view the expandable taxonomy of topics, please go to http://ssrn.com.ezp1.harvard.edu/browse.) Finally, there is simply a lot of great stuff on this network, as well as the Social Sciences Research Network– I’ve been poking around the site this morning, and have found several items of interest which I’m planning on looking into in the near future.

More information can be found in this press release, as well as in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (Harvard ID and PIN required to access it.)

I’ll also post this link in the blogroll.

Please let me know if you have any questions.