databases

Help Test New Resources: Jewish Studies, Research Methods, Travel

Here at Snell we are always looking for new online research tools that would be useful to the Northeastern community. They are often expensive, however, and so we usually try them out before we buy them. You can always see what’s currently on trial by going to the All Databases and Trials page and clicking on the link that says “check out our current database trials.” (Also, note the evaluation form on that page — be sure to fill that out so we can have your feedback on these resources!) Right now we have some very interesting products on trial. To welcome Dr. Lori Lefkovitz, the new director of Northeastern’s Jewish Studies Program, we have a couple of Jewish Studies resources to sample. The Index to Jewish Periodicals provides access to English-language articles and book reviews on Jewish history, activity, and thought in more than 220 journals devoted to Jewish affairs, with coverage back to 1988. Jewish Studies Source offers a multidisciplinary view into the study of Jewish civilization from its historical origins to the present, drawing across multiple areas of study, and contains much full text (over 350 titles). Both resources are available to try out until the end of 2010. Another new tool you can try is Sage Research Methods Online. This resource provides full text for more than 500 books and several encyclopedias offering relevant research methods content across the social and behavioral sciences, covering quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods (it includes the well-known QASS or Little Green Book Series). You can try this until the end of 2010. Finally, an interesting departure from our usual resources: Global Road Warrior. According to its description, this is “a source for practical travel information and intercultural communication. You may want to make use of it to get acclimated to a country’s business culture and etiquette (greetings & courtesies, ethics, meetings, attire), society and culture (gift giving, food, media, time & punctuality) and travel tips (money & banking, transportation, and more) for 200+ countries.” This sounds like it would be great for students heading off to study-abroad programs or international co-op jobs. Global Road Warrior is on trial until January 9, 2011. Remember, when you test out any of the products on trial, be sure to fill out our feedback form letting us know what you thought!

Making The Library Work For You

(This may Develop into a series depending on how daring I am.)

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,

I’m just your friendly neighborhood Journalism major who works in one of the Library’s many offices. So, I find myself sitting here, clicking through the Library looking for something to write about; like many students I have the typical Generation-Y aversion to libraries. But, then I stumbled on something that made me realize I was wrong.

While there is a wealth of information available to us on the internet (I mean it’s even destroying my job prospects as I write this) there is some stuff you just can’t get. My first thought goes to older newspaper articles or back issues of magazines. And, while it is necessary to learn by doing, it is also pertinent to see what some of the greats have done to earn their stripes. Sadly, that is becoming more difficult.

The Library can actually be of tremendous help in that regard. The Library here at Northeastern maintains subscriptions to various databases that have newspapers dating back to 1690 and they have all the Papers of Record dating back until at least 1991(NYTimes, Boston Globe).  Added Bonus: It’s free for students!

So, not only can I meld my love of a good newspaper article with my love of the versatility of the internet, but I can also rid myself of a previously held, and somewhat misguided, notion that libraries are outdated.

As an added bonus, I’m going to read Distinguished Professor Walter V. Robinson’s article which brought the Catholic Church scandal into the limelight in 2002….See if you can find THAT on Boston.com.

Web of Science!

There’s been some good “viral marketing” going on on campus already, but I thought it was also worth mentioning here — the NU Libraries now offer Web of Science! We’re super-excited to finally have this powerful resource available. For those who may not be familiar with this database, it’s actually a suite of citation indexes from ISI Web of Knowledge. It includes Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index — so it’s not just science, despite the name. The main reason it’s so great is how easy it makes citation searching. Say you’ve found a good article from 1994 and you want to see how many articles after that date list the first article as a reference. Web of Science makes this extremely easy. Just enter the info about the 1994 article — usually author’s name and the journal title will be sufficient — and voila, you’ll get a list of subsequent articles that cite it. Then you can see what publications cite those articles, and so on, tracking a trail of citations up to the present day. Why is this useful? Well, generally speaking, the more a source is cited, the more important it is within its field. Maybe it’s important because it first introduced some major new discovery, or maybe it’s important because it makes a controversial claim that many other people want to debate. Either way, citation searching allows you to quickly see who the major players are in a given field, and how the dialog is continuing. It can be more targeted than regular keyword searching, too, since you can use the citation trail to follow the discussion of a particular topic. I urge all you researchers out there to head on over to the Library website and check out this terrific resource. Enjoy, and let us know what you think, or what tips you have for using it!