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К. Фурнисс, K. Furniss, e-mail: [email protected] *А.В. Трифонова, A. Trifonova, e-mail: [email protected] ProQuest LLC, Сидней, Австралия, Sydney, Australia * ProQuest LLC, Кембридж, Великобритания, Cambridge, Great Britain
ВАРИАНТЫ ДОСТУПА К РЕСУРСАМ ДЛЯ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЙ: ГДЕ ИСКАТЬ РЕСУРСЫ ПО ТЕХНИЧЕСКИМ НАУКАМ?
RESEARCHER'S RESOURCE OPRIONS: WHERE DO YOU GO TO RESEARCH SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING?
Современные исследователи в области технических наук часто сталкиваются с дилеммой: с чего начать? Существуют различные источники, к которым они должны иметь доступ для своих исследований: от наиболее цитируемых рецензируемых журналов до узкоспециальных графических материалов. Есть несколько вариантов доступа к этим ресурсам: поисковые машины, академические поисковые системы в открытом доступе, онлайн коллекции научных издательств, агрегированные полнотекстовые базы данных, базы данных научного цитирования, специализированные реферативные и библиографические базы данных. Все упомянутые выше опции по отдельности не могут обеспечить всесторонний доступ к источникам и исследователи могут пропустить важные для них сведения. ProQuest SciTech коллекция объединяет специализированные базы данных, чтобы обеспечить исследователям более глубокий уровень доступа к источникам по техническим наукам. Коллекция сочетает в себе полнотекстовые научные журналы, детально индексированные графические элементы и таблицы, реферативные и библиографические материалы.
Modern researchers in the area of technical sciences often face with the dilemma: Where to Start? There are the different information resources, which they need to have access: from highly cited peer reviewed journals to specific graphic materials. There are several options to get access to these sources: general web search engine, scholarly open web engine, primary publishers collections, full text aggregated database, citation database, specialised Abstract & Index databases. All options mentioned above cannot provide the comprehensive access and researchers may miss some relevant information. ProQuest SciTech Collection brings together specialised databases to ensure that researchers have essential depth of insight into the technical disciplines. The collection combines full-text journals, deep indexed figures and tables and bibliographic abstracts and index.
Ключевые слова: источники научной информации, технические науки, рецензируемые научные журналы, полнотекстовые базы данных, Аарон Лерхер, детальное индексирование, графические материалы, таблицы
Keywords: resources, technical sciences, peer reviewed journals, full-text databases, Aaron Lercher, deep indexing, specific graphic materials, tables
Searching through scholarly material on the web has never been easy and today, it is becoming nearly impossible to trace developing research using the Internet. Especially the researchers in the area of technical sciences often face with the dilemma: Where to Start?
There are the different categories of information resources, which researchers need to have access for their studies: highly cited peer reviewed journals; other peer reviewed journals; other scholarly journals; open access scholarly journals; scholarly books; dissertations & theses; conference papers/proceedings; trade publications; industry reports; news.
What resource the researcher uses depends on the sophistication of the researcher and the topic and scope of enquiry. We might expect the inexperienced student to go straight to Google or a similar resource -research into user behavior shows that even experienced researchers start here. Google does a great job of a random shotgun effect across everything, but it is the "Lucky Dip": a mixture of FT and abstracts - widely used - lacking precision and consistency in use, results or details of coverage.
In order to submit reliable and scholarly work the student will need to find reliable sources - hopefully via the library resources you've invested in. Google scholar - tremendous as a free resource but there are well documented issues with the scope of sources included (not disclosed) and its reliability for precision searching.
You may have a big deal from a primary publisher (like Elsevier, Springer, Wiley), but you will never have all relevant publications available in full text however big your library, because probably you don't have them from every publisher - so there are gaps.
Aggregated solutions (like ProQuest Science Journals) are a great solution, but there will be also gaps and embargoes due to licensing restrictions. So your researchers will miss some information. And this is one reason why abstract databases remain relevant.
As for citation databases like Web of Science or Scopus, these literally set the benchmark for what is a highly cited peer reviewed journal. Literally it defines journals with Impact Factors. Here by definition they cover all of the important stuff (highly cited high impact) - and they are the definition of what is highly cited. The majority of publications are therefore excluded - some justifiably and some controversially. Great articles/papers can appear in Journals which are not covered by WOS. Used as a bibliometric tool it is one of the 2 main measures (the other being Scopus) of an academic author's status and an academic publication's status. Only the elite are included in this database. It is also used as a research tool and it is highly effective if you understand its limitations.
Advantage: it will find you highly cited publications relating to your keywords. These are the most well known in the field and should be something researchers are aware of. A bi-product of searching across so many diverse and unrelated fields is that it can be effective in finding relevant research in unexpectedly unrelated fields (you may find that an article on ant decision making is highly cited in an article on artificial intelligence).
Weakness: You are missing a large portion of research out there which is not covered. Materials from emerging authors, economies or in new fields are less likely to be covered. You don't have the precision and depth you might require to go really in depth in your particular field.
Philosophy of Web of Science was based on Bradford's law - that the core literature of a discipline was comprised in a relatively small number of key titles. Therefore by indexing the top titles (only) you should be able to cover the majority of the concepts in the discipline. Implicitly this means missing out a proportion of what is published within the discipline. And the volume of publishing continues to grow. So potentially miss more and more.
In contrast Abstracts &Index (A&I) Bibliographic Databases are selected by specialists who review the publications in the discipline deciding which are important - if a new one is highlighted to our editors we will endeavor to include it - unlike WOS who have to wait 3 years to see how its citations perform. As researchers today have llimited time to scan a discipline, abstracts become a special value. Discipline oriented A&I databases deliver unique abstracting and indexing using subject based vocabularies and taxonomies for true "context" (thesauri available for precise searching), extensive back files built by qualified editorial teams over decades which properly support literature reviews and longitudinal studies, ability to navigate a new field quickly by seeing the "language of the discipline" in action when searching, proper orientation with less noise and more accuracy with results related to the search and topic (for example GeoRef, ASFA or Biosis or Compendex). Discipline focused A&I databases try to include everything relevant within a narrow focused topic. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (now ProQuest) - has a great legacy in doing this well.
Aaron Lercher, mathematics librarian at Louisiana State University, concluded in his study, that universities must ensure that their researchers are getting access to the most comprehensive set of literature possible. A high level of confidence that your users are getting the data they need to complete their literature reviews and funded projects is essential (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(10):2049-2060, 2010). The «Late Finds» phenomena is becoming more of an economic issue:
- «Late Finds» is defined as scientific literature that would have been useful to projects if it had been found in time;
- a recent international study of 246 active research scientists found increasing rates of «late finds».
- an estimate of 76 days and $9,563 lost in time and money per late find was found;
- among high income European Union and other countries, 42% reported late finds;
- among low-and middle-income countries, 56% reported late finds.
ProQuest SciTech Collection brings together these specialised databases to ensure that researchers have this essential depth of insight into the disciplines we cover. The collection combined full-text journals, deep indexed figures and tables (Illustrata) and traditional bibliographic abstracts and index (A&I).
ProQuest SciTech Collection contains more than 5,000 full-text titles from over 50 countries: trade and industry journals related to discipline to orient graduating students to their new industry; scholarly and peer reviewed journals with impact factor ratings; scientific and technology magazines; technical and government reports; environment and energy news; government and industry wire feeds; environment book chapters; IT conference proceedings; environmental impact statements.
Deep Indexing provides new discovery of research represented in tables, charts, figures and graphs. Counters customer objections to A&I only products - goes beyond A&I, beyond the competition such as Engineering Village and Scopus, includes Open Access Deep Indexing including international titles and pro-
vides greater return on investment for electronic journal subscriptions. The point of the database is not to provide images but to lead researchers to find articles which contain graphs, charts, images etc., which have been indexed and categorized with similar terms to those they searched for.
ProQuest A&I Databases are created and structured by science/engineering specialists with the intention of providing comprehensive literature review for the discipline (ProQuest's editors are experts in their fields - ensuring that the right publications and documents are indexed and monitoring and adding controlled vocabulary). Furthermore researchers conduct very comprehensive literature reviews across the entire discipline - A&I has greater breadth, depth and scope than full text resources - whether within your library holdings, or outside in the mega databases like google scholar etc. Google has no indexing standards, no controlled vocabulary, no specialist content sets - and we're not sure what they are including and what they are leaving out. A&I databases are truly international in scope and multilingual (with abstracts in English) - as researchers want the information regardless of where it was published. They go beyond journals covering for example grey literature e.g. conference proceedings, patents, government papers etc. There is no embargo on A&I content, as there may be in full-text databases. Many publishers are understandably not making all their full text available to aggregators and institutions are not going to subscribe to everything. If their researchers need current, timely information, they cannot afford a 6-12 month embargo. A&I provide high return on investment: having discovered an article exists the researcher needs to find it. It may already be within the library - in print or online but the researcher has discovered it thanks to A&I. The researcher needs good quality abstracts to review, to assess what articles he will actually invest time in reading fully.
All in all the advantages of ProQuest SciTech Collections:
- the capability to search comprehensively with precision and speed;
- the foundation of traditional and innovative abstracting and indexing of all relevant literature;
- the scope of coverage (journals, conference proceedings, dissertations, and more - cannot be duplicated in a stand-alone aggregated database);
- with Discovery established, they capitalize on our agreements with thousands of publishers to provide immediate access to key content sources identified through the search process.
Summarize ProQuest SciTech Collections takes serious research in Science & Engineering domains to another level supporting the intense level of detail and comprehensiveness required for more advanced researchers (suitable for Domain-Specific Researchers but also catering to the lower levels of researchers through the provision of full text content).
At the end high level researchers who are publishing papers are the ones who will be establishing their own impact and effect the rankings of the university. It is vital that they are given the tools to maximise their effectiveness in research.
