Reference Reviews
Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
March 2008
This database has been the first to put the humans in the center of country statistics through the introduction of the human development index (HDI). Later, it added the Gender-specific Development Index (GDI), the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and the Human Poverty Index to the yearly Human Development Reports. These measures and the index values are controversial (as most of such indices, and especially, composite measures are). They represent good starting points to gauge human development, and gender inequities in countries around the world —except for the human poverty measures which put, for example Singapore and the Occupied Palestinian Territory almost cheek-to-cheek. In addition to celebrating women's history month through speeches, biographies, and articles, this factographic database should get more attention, support and funding to inform better about the gross inequities of women in many countries.
February 2008
This regularly updated and enhanced factbook remains a leading open access ready-reference source for country information. It includes public domain information gathered by the CIA about nearly 200 countries, and about 100 geographically and/or politically important entities, compiled from some other data of various agencies, aggregated into a systematic ensemble of essential and fairly current statistical information.
January 2008
The Visual Dictionary Online is an almost perfect general dictionary created by the fusion of parts of a splendid picture dictionary with few words and text definitions by a group of top-notch lexicographers. It has some unevenness in the coverage of objects and concepts, an irritating oversight in the religion section and a few illustrations that are less than contemporary, but overall it is an outstanding, free Web resource in the sub-genre among the many free online dictionaries.
December 2007
Amazon MP3 download store offers 3 million legal, unprotected, high-quality tracks for 89¢-99¢ a piece, and albums from $6 to $11, directly in MP3 format. All these are yours to play and burn without the usual limitations imposed by Digital Rights Management software, and without any membership fees. However, the search module needs to be improved.
November 2007
Significant gaps were filled in Scopus since I last reviewed it, and many journals were added. Some substantial gaps still remain. Given the software's trademark fusion of the smooth elegance of ballroom dancing and the power and dynamism of raw flamenco dancing by the late Antonio Gades and his "bailaores," it is not surprising, that there are many spiffy software features that I enjoy (and one that I consider to be a faux pas—literally and figuratively).
October 2007
This is another open access gem in the digital reference collection of the Terrorism Information Center of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT). It is a licensed version of the digital edition by Gale of the print encyclopedia of Sage Publications. Considering daily events of terrorism, it is somewhat dated as are most of the related encyclopedias on the topic, but it perfectly complements the other resources developed by MIPT or licensed by MIPT for free worldwide access. It provides excellent background for putting into perspective the contemporary acts of terrorism, if not the mindset of their perpetrators.
Two years ago I wrote about the unusually well–designed Terrorism Knowledge Base of the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT). Since then, the Web collection hosted by the site has immensely increased, while the concerns about terrorism and the daily number of victims of it did not decrease at all. The War & Terrorism database is part of the impressive open access digital collection of the Terrorism Information Center of MIPY. It includes a series of essential ready reference sources on the topic of terrorism. The W&TC is an InfoTrac Custom Journal Collection produced by Gale, the host of my column.
September 2007
PILOTS is an important open access indexing/abstracting database of journal articles, books, book chapters, doctoral dissertations, reports and pamphlets related to various stress disorders. In spite of its name and sponsorship, it is not restricted to issues related only to veterans and military matters, neither to posttraumatic stress. It also covers serious acute stress disorders (ASD) from all angles, from medical, psychological and sociological to legal and economical. It is a genuinely multidisciplinary indexing/abstracting database with an increasing number of links to the full–text documents, including many (but not all) of the open access ones from the broad spectrum of journals it covers.
This most current of the few comprehensive science and technology dictionaries with a rather hefty price tag in book format is brought to us free in digital format by Answers.com. Our delight with the dictionary, however, is spoiled by a serious glitch in the software that hides many definitions available in the dictionary.
August 2007
An excellent full-text open access resource for U.S. government-produced scientific papers about energy science and technology. Although the database is part of the science.gov site (which I recently reviewed in detail, and of the recently launched scitopia service (which I will review), the native site has its advantages, both in terms of search and output options — key aspects for those who go for the jugular, and quickly want to find free full-text research documents about topics related to energy.
Springer (after acquiring Kluwer Academic) has become the second largest publisher of scientific, technical and medical journals, and has done an impressive job in digitizing the back issues of most of Springer and Kluwer journals back to their first issue. Its software —provided by Metapress which recently came out of a long period of inertia with this nifty release— is exemplary in many regards, and has only a few deficiencies.
SpringerLink is the flagship application among the Metapress clients, and also among the digital collections of the most avant guard publishers. It is to be noted that SpringerLink makes good use of the ever-increasing CrossRef database to inform the users (even the non-subscribers) how many times a paper was cited in journals published by CrossRef members. It is not as sophisticated as the use of CrossRef for the same purpose in the splendid PROLA archive of the American Physical Society, but it is an important example for other publishers that will also use CrossRef to offer search options based on cited and citing references.
July 2007
TranStats is one of the U.S. government's innovative and very useful numeric databases. Beyond providing visually pleasing and easy-to-understand tabular and graphic information about a variety of statistics and demographics of the American transportation system, it also allows dynamic customization of the subset of the data to be retrieved. TranStats also allows downloading of data sets for further processing by the user. It is a perfect complement to the indexing/abstracting and partially full text TRIS database for those in need of transportation-related information.
At first, FlightStats may not look like a ready-reference source, but it is; just as the Official Airline Guide (OAG) listing flight schedules in two huge volumes in font size eight has been for decades. The free FlightStats is so much more than those rather expensive OAG books have been. It is by far the most comprehensive ready-reference source for current and historical information about many practical aspects of air travel, not merely about flight statistics. Its design and implementation with smooth integration of relevant third-party content is a good model for other reference sources, for solutions to make them really ready reference tools. It can often help in choosing the least inconvenient flights and airports; the least unreliable routes and airlines; and the least expensive airfares.
June 2007
Genamics has been offering for years this very good open access journal directory that covers both the traditional print and Web-born journals. An enhanced version is part of the Openly 1Cate Link Server now owned by OCLC, and it is also available for licensing by libraries to enhance the standard serials catalog records. Only the features of the open access version are reviewed here.
The dLIST depository is one of the two, relatively small digital preprint/reprint collections dedicated to library and information science & technology. It has documents in a variety of formats (DOC, PPT, HTML) from prominent sources by prominent authors with an unusually large choice of access points. Unfortunately, full-text searching is not one of the search options in this otherwise worthy depository.
May 2007
The E-LIS service is an e-print repository of full-text papers related to library and information science (and technology even though it is not part of the acronym). It is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the discipline and particularly important for those who would like to know about the related literature emerging in Europe, Asia and Central and South America. The software lacks the essential feature of searching by exact phrase, but it deserves credit for its excellent other features.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which celebrated its 60th anniversary this May, has an archaic name but has been one of the pioneering publishers in digitizing their print collections of journals and other serial publications. ACM was the first –competing with Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.- to offer a yearly conference about Digital Libraries. Several years ago the two societies joined forces in organizing this important conference. ACM stands out from the group of publishers by offering not only the bibliographic records and abstracts for its papers free, but also the list of all the cited and some of the citing references.
April 2007
The content of this site is highly informative, unique and current, offering hundreds of essential "citational" statistics and top lists of scientists, research papers and journals in 20+ major fields of science, engineering, medicine and social science. The first look at the interface may give the impression as if it had been created 15 years ago by a stay-home dad who just got his first HTML page and an affordable inkjet color printer, but the content is both fresh and historical, providing perspective and context. This open access source (along with a separate open access resource that I will review later) is a subset of the subscription-based Essential Science Indicators Database created by the Research Services Group of Thomson Science.
March 2007
The fourth version of this search portal is an excellent tool for searching a variety of scientific-technological government document repositories and other science databases of 12 U.S. government agencies in one fell swoop. It is supported and maintained by the CENDI inter-agency working group, and is powered by the Explorit software of Deep Web Technologies, Inc. It offers good search filters for focusing the search and layering the search results (although indirectly) by disciplinary areas (environment, health, etc.) and it does efficient results ranking and even has sort options by title, author, source and publication date. Date range also can be used for narrowing the search. In spite of some oddities, it is a far better resource for finding information about scientific papers of federal government agencies than the special government search engines of Google and Microsoft.
This popular resource of nearly 17,000 reviews of ready-reference publications has been enhanced by a swift and smart software, and offers an excellent tool not only for acquisitions and reference librarians to know which ready-references sources may complement their existing collection, but also for end-users to find out which encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, biographies, bibliographies yearbooks, directories and handbooks may be the most appropriate for looking up a fact.
February 2007
It took a long time to enhance this outstanding collection of more than 100,000 competent, compact and critical reviews with an improved –if not perfect- software, but now Choice Online Reviews features an engine to make the top-notch content more accessible and exportable. In spite of a few weak points in content and some deficiencies in software that must be fixed quickly, this database would get my Outstanding Academic Title nomination, especially if it implements the missing links and meshes up its reviews and lists with precious value-added pieces of information from Amazon. Highly recommended for every academic and even for large public libraries.
CSA of the Cambridge Information Group rung in the new year with the release of CSA Illustrata, an innovative, leading edge database of more than 165,000 traditional indexing/abstracting records plus close to one million richly indexed illustrations extracted from scientific journal articles published in the past 10 years. CSA established itself in the early 1970s as an indexing/abstracting service, and now is bent on revitalizing and revolutionizing the indexing/abstracting database genre. One may argue exactly how many words a picture (chart, table, graph, map, photo, etc.) is worth, but my in-depth testing of the pre-release version of CSA Illustrata showed that an image can be worth much more than a thousand words as they can significantly improve the precision/pertinence of the scholarly information retrieval process.
January 2007
Blackwell's digital collection includes more than 1 million articles from nearly 900 journals. The bibliographic records and abstracts are open access; the full-text documents are available for subscribers in a variety of pricing options. More than 60% of Blackwell's journals are covered both by Web of Science and Scopus, indicating the importance of the Blackwell's titles. The new user interface has a cleaner design with new features, but it still leaves room for further refinements. Even if your library subscribes to the digital full-text of only some of the Blackwell titles, the possibility to search for free the bibliographic data, the abstracts and the full text of all the digitized articles in this genuinely multidisciplinary collection can make it an important tool on a digital reference shelf.
This granddaddy of citation indexes has kept adding new content and software features through regular updates, and now has reached a very important milestone. The clustering of results set by eight criteria; the instant calculation and superbly informative and compact visualization of new citation measures, such as the sum of times a paper was cited; the insta-charts showing the contour of publishing productivity and citedness pattern of the chosen entities (authors, journals, organizations, topics) across time; and the exporting of these details into a spreadsheet and/or to the free version of the Web-based Endnote software represents more than a series of evolutionary steps.
December 2006
Scirus has come a long way since my first review in 2001 on its debut. It grew from a 50-million item search engine to a 300-million item database with increasingly significant and expansive coverage of scholarly sources and powerful software. The enhancements in its content and software made it a pick a few years ago for the Peter's Databases Picks and Pans column and the winner of several awards in the specialty search engine categories for good reasons.
Silobreaker is a groundbreaker in presenting news in a format that allows users to see the forest AND the trees. If you wish, you can get a close-up of any of the trees, any of their branches and leaves. Then, without losing momentum, users can swing around the news canopy almost as swiftly as Tarzan through the vines of the rainforest.
November 2006
The largest collection of book reviews published since 1987 in the print and online edition of Publishers Weekly has become open access (along with other materials in Publishers Weekly). Although only the title and some bibliographic data elements (ISBN, author, publisher, BISAC subject) are searchable, not the full text itself, the full text of the reviews can be displayed and printed. The informative reviews help in selecting the most appropriate books for adults, children and young adults in all genres, and on all subjects. The software has some annoying deficiencies that may confuse the users, but are easy to fix.
Good source for getting a feel for the content, style, typography, and illustrations of books through previewing a few pages. Very good ready reference source for finding definitions, descriptions from respected dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, fact books and similar publications. Most of the fully viewable books are a worthy bonus, but many of the older ones from the past centuries are illegible for the human eye. It is frustrating that even this project has problems with elementary search and filtering operations just like Google Scholar has.
October 2006
The most comprehensive and smartest Web portal about the library and information science and technology scene in and about Asia and the Pacific region. It offers current news about databases, information services, digital journals, search software developments, library schools and movers and shakers in the region (and beyond, as far as they relate to Asia and the Pacific and Oceania).
This may be the best gift that library and information professionals ever received from commercial information services. LISTA is an open-access mega indexing/abstracting database on its own. Depending on the context and mix of the other (subscription-based) databases of EBSCO in which the LISTA database is invoked, it also offers seamless links to 552,560 full-text documents, as well as a swift pathfinder to full-text documents of library and information science and technology literature in the digital archives of publishers to which a library subscribes. (This is not to be confused with the subscription-based database known as LISTA with Full Text). Some of the software features need improvement but you can look this gift horse in the mouth and be delighted.
September 2006
Annual Reviews form an exceptionally high impact publication series in about 30 disciplines, providing excellent literature reviews on the most current issues in the subject fields. The full text of more than 20,000 reviews are freely searchable. The full text itself is not open access but the documents from the "Annual Review of ..." series are very reasonably priced for instant download.
The largest of the scholarly publishers' digital archives now has nearly 8 million full-text searchable journal articles and as many open access bibliographic records (about 75% of them with open access abstracts, according to my test searches). ScienceDirect sports a rejuvenated, swifter, and breezier software, which nevertheless needs correction in the algorithm of matching cited and citing items.
© 2008 Gale.
