Biology Article Retrieval from Various Databases: Making Good Choices with Limited Resources
- Autores: Yvonne Jones
- Localización: Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, ISSN-e 1092-1206, Nº. 44, 2005
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
If the top tier indexing resource in a discipline is not available on an ongoing basis for undergraduate student use, can acceptable article retrieval be obtained using other available resources or combinations of resources? This paper examines a single search term comparison of the biological research literature retrieved from BIOSIS Previews as well as eight other databases: BasicBIOSIS, ArticleFirst, ECO, ProQuest, WilsonWeb, SciFinder Scholar, HighWire, and MEDLINE. Comparison is also made with results from the recently available beta version of Google Scholar. A combination of databases yielded a result rate of 59% of the most recent eight years of BIOSIS results. A 51% return rate compared with BIOSIS could be obtained from searching only two major interfaces, the FirstSearch provider for ArticleFirst and ECO along with SciFinder Scholar. Google Scholar provided a 56% retrieval in comparison with the most recent BIOSIS results. A significant benefit of the Google Scholar search was the sizable number (N=69) of additional articles retrieved that were not found in BIOSIS.
