Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

September 2007

Title: McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, 6th edition
Publisher: Answers.com
URL: http://www.answers.com
Cost: Free
Tested: August 20-24, 2007

The Context

Answers Corporation’s free reference suite has been a favorite of mine for more than a decade. This may not be obvious as I have not written about it lately, and the service under the name Answers.com was launched only a few years ago. Earlier when I reviewed this first-class ready-reference service, it was known as Atomica, GuruNet and Sling.

The McGrill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms (MDSTT) joins several high-quality ready-reference sources, such as the Columbia Encyclopedia, the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, the Concise Edition of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, the Dictionary of British History and the Philosophy Dictionary of Oxford University Press, and various encyclopedias of Gale, the publisher of this column, ranging from education to history to parapsychology.

Beyond the set of top-notch and time-honored ready-reference sources, Answers.com also includes Wikipedia. It is understandable that Answers.com did not want to defy the object of worship of a large segment of its user base. It has good articles with decent credits to the sources used in the compilation. It is another question why Answers.com should not be so obsequious as to put Wikipedia on the very top of the otherwise alphabetical list of copyright credentials http://www.answers.com/main/copyright.jsp (which is like electing Lybia to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission), while omitting —among others— the McGraw Hill Company or Gale from that list.

When it comes to open access comprehensive science and technology dictionaries, McGraw Hill rules the wave. Until 2002, it had a serious competitor in the open access arena, the Academic Press Dictionary of Science and Technology. Although Google brings this dictionary up for a search on the topic as the top hit, it has been as dead as Elvis for about five years. Not only the Canadian site, but also the link to the long inactive site of Harcourt/Academic Press, which still refers to the situation as if the unavailability was temporary.

It is available in the company of nearly two dozen superb science and technology dictionaries and encyclopedias on Credo, formerly Xrefer Plus, but it is a subscription-based service. So is ORO, the Oxford Reference Online service, and Gale’s Virtual Reference Library which —among handbooks, guides and other ready-reference sources— has the largest collection of dictionaries and encyclopedias in natural sciences, applied sciences and technology from adaptive technologies to database technologies to multimedia technologies.

The Content

The MDSTT offered at the Answers.com site is based on the 6th edition, which was published in 2002. Considering the pace of developments in science and technology, this may not seem very current, but except for the American Heritage Science Dictionary of 2005, I don’t know of any other comprehensive science and technology dictionary —fee based or open access— which would be more current in print, let alone online.

Several publishers have published dictionaries of science and technology but none of them are more current. Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology comes the closest to MDSTT in terms of currency with its revised 1999 edition. The New Penguin Dictionary of Science and Technology was certainly new in the late 1990s when it was compiled, but it is almost twice as old as MDSTT. The dictionaries of Harrap, Larousse and Cambridge University Press are even older.

MDSTT has 110,000 terms and about 125,000 definitions. I always prefer to base my data about the real size and other dimensions of a database on my own tests, rather than on the publisher’s claim, but in this case there is no way to do this.

There is only one dictionary that comes close to MDSTT, the Academic Press Dictionary of Science and Technology, but its latest edition is from 1992. The above-mentioned Chambers dictionary’s publicity blurb claims that it is “widely recognized as the most comprehensive and authoritative single-volume dictionary of its kind”, it has less than half as many main entries as MDSTT. The “New” Penguin dictionary has definitions for merely 7,000 terms. The American Heritage Science Dictionary is good but not at all comprehensive, with definitions for merely 8,500 terms.

There are hundreds of open-access science and technology dictionaries on the Web, but they are discipline-specific, ranging from agriculture, to zoology, and ranging from a dozen words as the Tsunami Terminology to several thousand words as the Life Science Dictionary.

The large size of MDSTT is justified by the fact that it covers much more than just strictly science and technology. It has broad coverage —among others— also for terms used in medicine and psychology. There are more than 120 syndromes defined, and 30 disorders. For several words in my list of test words, only MDSTT had a definition, such as vortex cage meter, kalema, a heavy surf type, Békésy audiometry (smartly masking the accented characters in the URL), presbycusis. For fairness, the Stedman Medical Dictionary had a definition under the other common spelling variant, presbyiacusis.

The entries have compact definitions as you would expect from a dictionary and a pronunciation guide, which can be a godsend not only for ultra tongue twisters like this one, but also for the shorter words with fewer consonants and Greco-Latin prefixes and suffixes. The entries give fairly clear definitions for the terms for well-educated readers, but sometimes even they will struggle in comprehending the definitions. I had not the faintest idea about the meaning of some words, because their definitions included several words that would need their own definitions (in a pop-up window) before proceeding to the next. The definition of xyridaceae was for me the least understandable. MDSTT does not have a definition for a few terms on my test list of words, such as the Erdős number (which gets good treatment only by Wolfram MathWorld from the open-access series of the very talented Eric Weisstein and by Wikipedia from the sources in Answers.com. Neither is there a definition for irukandji, the tiny but lethal jellyfish that is not defined and described by other encyclopedias, let alone by dictionaries — except for the multivolume, richly illustrated Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia of Gale (yes, the publisher of my column) and Wikipedia — although it defines the Irukandji people under the term, and has a separate entry for irukandji jellyfish.

Unfortunately, for many of my test words, no definitions came up from MDSTT. After much frustration, I figured out that this was due to a software glitch that will be discussed in the software part of this column.

The print edition has black and white illustrations which can immensely enhance a definition, but these are not present in the entries in the Answers.com version. This is due to the open-access nature of this version. The illustrations would be very useful, as can be seen in the Credo implementation of MDSTT.

Omission of illustrations, of course, is not a necessary trait of open access, but makes it understandable. Oddly, not even those who subscribe to Access Science, the online service of McGraw-Hill, Inc. would see the illustrations in the dictionary. Apparently, only the Credo service provides this value added information.

Luckily, many of the illustrations are included in the Concise Edition of McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, which is also part of the Answers.com service (but it does not identify it correctly, consistently omitting the concise qualifier). The bonus consolation prize is that often these illustrations are in color, and appear right after the entry from the dictionary.

The Software

Answers.com's software is smooth and intuitive overall but has few remarkable features apart from the fact that it allows cross searching of all the assets at once, or search of a specific work, such as the MDSTT. It does not offer truncation, let alone proximity or positional operators, which could be useful for the lengthy encyclopedic articles.

One feature stands out from the software options: the possibility to browse the aggregate index and pick the qualified terms. This is important because there is such a variety of sources, that it helps if the qualified terms can be looked up and chosen, such as depression in psychiatry, economics, kinesiology, physiology, or geology. Similarly, this index look-up can help in distinguishing names of persons and locations, such as London as the capital of England, or a city in Canada, or the family name of a person such as Jack London.

There are some customization options, including enabling of the above look-up functions, choosing the type of resource that should show up first in the result list, display of the translation of the search term in a good dozen languages, and/or translating the full page into one of 10 languages. I could not get this last option to work.

The MDSTT can be both browsed and searched on its own. Browsing is useful when you want to see what combinations of a word appear as main headings. It is a bit cumbersome as first you have to choose the first letter of the term, then go page by page to where the term appears. You may jump from page to -say- page 17 of the letter G, but you may only guess on which page your term would be. I was looking for terms starting with genes, and after the first few slow page by page moves I jumped to page 17, a tad too far, leapfrogging gene, gene control, gene conversion, gene duplication and gene escape as gene stat at the bottom of page 16. This is not a big issue, requiring only to step back one page, but it would be much better to use a similar function as in browsing the cumulative index of entry terms that make the list scroll down as more letters of the term are typed in. Once you are at the right page, a click would take you to the definition of the term in MDSST- or not. The latter alternative is very confusing as the term should not appear in the index generated from MDSTT. Actually, all the terms that seem to be missing are there in the MDSTT they are just not found by the software. Sometimes terms from other dictionaries are brought up when clicking on a term from the index of MDSTT, as happened for the term “quark” in the index list. Clicking on it brought up four definitions come up, starting with the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary, the second from Oxford University Press’ Dictionary of Food and Nutrition for quark as a type of cheese, then the entry from Britannica Concise, and finally the article from Wikipedia. You don’t need to scroll up and down to see if you may skipped the definition from MDSTT as at the bottom of the result page their copyright statement serves as a good summary of the sources from which results were retrieved.

There is no such problem with the term “quark confinement,” which brings up a single result (along with annoyingly sandwiched ads — which comes with the turf of open access in this case), and that is indeed from MDSTT.

The same happens when clicking on the result list produced by the search for “quark,” which shows all the main entries which include quark, not just where it is the lead term as is the case with browsing.

This happened for many of my test terms. It would be easy to say that if there is a definition from another dictionary, the one from MDSTT is suppressed. It makes no sense, of course, and it is not the case. The are definitions for polar vortex both in MDSTT and the Geography Dictionary of the Oxford University Press and both appear. Maybe the conflict kicks in only if American Heritage Dictionary also has a definition for the term.

I double checked the presence of my test words in the Credo system, and all of them were indeed present in its version of MTSDD. The same was true for the open-access dictionary in the Access Science online service. Still, the casual user would be misled, confused and deprived of many good definitions from MTSDD if this glitch is not fixed. Luckily, this does not have an effect on the articles from the McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology.