17 oktober 2006
You know it is there, but you can’t search for it
Praise the Web! An avalanche of databases have become available and above all user friendly forms to search these databases. Commercial database providers have adopted this trend, and nowadays I can’t imagine professional databases that are not available through one of these ubiquitous web forms.
But so now and then I long for a command prompt on some of these databases. It happened to me today. I was inspired by an article from Adkins and Bud (2006) to have a look at the Scholarly productivity of Dutch LIS faculty. I was once quoted on this answer “I am well and truly under the impression that there is no Dutch Academic LIS research environment whatsoever. It sounds a bit harsh, but so be it”. I should perhaps have made the exception for the researchers at CWTS and Loet Leydesdorff from UVA, but they are more IS rather than L and that was and is my perspective when I made this comment.
So I wanted to have a look at the output from Dutch LIS departments. I know there is a group on book and information science at the UVA, but furthermore this whole branch of science was and is a mystery to me. Thinking so much about bridges between science and practice.
How to gain insight about the best of Dutch LIS output quickly? Web of Science of course. Darlin or LISTA were not of any help really. I was aware that you could download the subject categories from the Journal Citation Reports from WoS, but until today I never searched for these in WoS. This is perhaps not a routine search but it should be possible. It should, shouldn’t it? Well, rather unfortunately, subject categories can’t be searched in WoS. In JCR, the analytical counterpart of WoS, there is the category of “Information Science & Library Science”. Some 55 journals are listed in this category (not all of them appear scholarly to me, i.e. having peer review). But still the annoying thing is that you can search for this category in WoS, but only download this information after you have found it. Odd isn’t it?
So what to do? Quite simple. Download this journal table from JCR, this table comes standard with abbreviated journal titles. Look up the exact full titles, and include these journal titles in a WoS search combined with the Netherlands in the address field.
In Dialog, the command prompt world, you could have searched simply the SC= field. To slap you in the face, when you download those LIS publications the SC tag is there, containing the “Information Science & Library Science”. But it is not searchable using one these user friendly search forms in WoS. Not even using the field tags in the advanced search box where you can construct quite complicated searches. Isn’t that a shame that the information is there but you can’t search for it because the designers of the query form did not think about it? I am afraid that WoS is not the only exception. And that is a real pity.
When the googlification of databases through simplified search forms means that you can’t search for the properly organized wealth of information within these databases we have a serious problem.
Literature:
Adkins, D. & J. Budd (2006). Scholarly productivity of U.S. LIS faculty. Library & Information Science Research 28(3): 374-389. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2006.03.021.
Technorati tags: Web of Science; WoS; Advanced Search; Search Commands
But so now and then I long for a command prompt on some of these databases. It happened to me today. I was inspired by an article from Adkins and Bud (2006) to have a look at the Scholarly productivity of Dutch LIS faculty. I was once quoted on this answer “I am well and truly under the impression that there is no Dutch Academic LIS research environment whatsoever. It sounds a bit harsh, but so be it”. I should perhaps have made the exception for the researchers at CWTS and Loet Leydesdorff from UVA, but they are more IS rather than L and that was and is my perspective when I made this comment.
So I wanted to have a look at the output from Dutch LIS departments. I know there is a group on book and information science at the UVA, but furthermore this whole branch of science was and is a mystery to me. Thinking so much about bridges between science and practice.
How to gain insight about the best of Dutch LIS output quickly? Web of Science of course. Darlin or LISTA were not of any help really. I was aware that you could download the subject categories from the Journal Citation Reports from WoS, but until today I never searched for these in WoS. This is perhaps not a routine search but it should be possible. It should, shouldn’t it? Well, rather unfortunately, subject categories can’t be searched in WoS. In JCR, the analytical counterpart of WoS, there is the category of “Information Science & Library Science”. Some 55 journals are listed in this category (not all of them appear scholarly to me, i.e. having peer review). But still the annoying thing is that you can search for this category in WoS, but only download this information after you have found it. Odd isn’t it?
So what to do? Quite simple. Download this journal table from JCR, this table comes standard with abbreviated journal titles. Look up the exact full titles, and include these journal titles in a WoS search combined with the Netherlands in the address field.
In Dialog, the command prompt world, you could have searched simply the SC= field. To slap you in the face, when you download those LIS publications the SC tag is there, containing the “Information Science & Library Science”. But it is not searchable using one these user friendly search forms in WoS. Not even using the field tags in the advanced search box where you can construct quite complicated searches. Isn’t that a shame that the information is there but you can’t search for it because the designers of the query form did not think about it? I am afraid that WoS is not the only exception. And that is a real pity.
When the googlification of databases through simplified search forms means that you can’t search for the properly organized wealth of information within these databases we have a serious problem.
Literature:
Adkins, D. & J. Budd (2006). Scholarly productivity of U.S. LIS faculty. Library & Information Science Research 28(3): 374-389. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2006.03.021.
Technorati tags: Web of Science; WoS; Advanced Search; Search Commands
Labels: English, Web of Science, WoS, Zoeken
