Regarding a recent Lactnet discussion about conducting research, particularly related to searching for full-text journal articles and the challenges in conducting searches via PubMed, I emailed Brett Miller, a librarian friend at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia USA, where I'd spent a few afternoons and evenings last summer happily doing some online research.  In my email to Brett, I had used the example of searching for Carolyn Rovee-Collier's articles in PubMed, and getting only 22 listings.  Rovee-Collier is the revered founder of the field of infant long-term memory research, with over 200 journal articles in publication, as well as numerous chapters and textbooks in publication.    

As Lisa Marasco mentioned in a recent post, PubMed doesn't bring up everything we'd like, even when it's out there somewhere.  From a professional standpoint, my two happiest library experiences have been at the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland USA, and West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia USA - - happiest because of the depth and breadth of tremendous access, with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) being TREMENDOUS, and West Virginia Wesleyan College being as helpful as I could hope for, while away from NLM.  

With his permission to post, Brett's insightful response is below.  At his request, I've redacted the name of another higher educational institution in politely discussing research challenges at a nearby institution, so as to not offend anyone there [the redaction is in brackets].    

"My response may not be the best, but I’ll try to formulate something to hopefully answer your questions.

"The Discovery tool you used to find articles this past summer is a product of a specific database company, EBSCO. While it is a ‘database’ in the traditional sense of being able to retrieve electronic materials, it functions in a different way and at a higher level. Discovery is what’s called a federated or aggregate search tool. The college subscribes to the service and, in turn, EBSCO consolidates most all of our library resources into a single, searchable location. Our entire ‘catalog’ of books, electronic books, CDs, DVDs, etc. are pulled into Discovery and can be found there with a call number so you can find them on the shelf. It goes on to pull in about 80% of our library’s total electronic database holdings. Essentially, you have a search engine that, for the first time, can give you results in a single location for a massive portion of our physical and electronic collections. While consolidated searching is really popular because it pulls resources from various sources into one place, it suffers from usability issues. A simple search could easily bring back millions of results, which would take a user years to parse through. Using Discovery effectively means understanding how to limit searches and how to conduct more advanced research to cull the results list to a workable number. In your case, Discovery worked well because you had very specific information that you were seeking and were able to use specific terms. 

"Our library pays subscription fees for access to around 100 different databases in a variety of subject areas. These databases are provided by different companies, many of which have a tiered subscription system. The more we pay, the greater degree of access they give us. In some cases, there is overlapping material in a few different databases. An example might be that we can access ‘Time Magazine’ from 1976-2001 in EBSCOHost and from 1982-present in ProjectMUSE (not a real example, just a hypothetical). EBSCO (the provider of Discovery) is a database provider, but also works with other database companies to aggregate search results into its Discovery tool. The access to different materials in different databases is all essentially driven by the market. Libraries have to be good stewards of limited resources, so reducing the amount of overlap whenever possible is a goal. In Wesleyan’s case, we make subscription decisions based on where we think the curricular need will be greatest. We then analyze usage statistics to see whether the resources we’re subscribed to are actually helping our faculty, staff, and students. If they aren’t, we’ll often cancel a database subscription and move to a different one that perhaps provides different kinds of information or a better interface that makes searching easier. The reason we chose EBSCO’s Discovery tool was because the search interface of EBSCO products tends to be really user-friendly.

"In terms of recommendations of specific databases of use to researchers on the listserv, I can give you a list to which Wesleyan is subscribed. As you found out at [another higher educational institution], many schools place different emphasis on electronic resources and have a different level of support to help implement those resources. There’s a lot of technological work that happens behind the scenes to support our database access. For instance, the license agreements for our databases stipulate that access should be generally limited to the campus community or at least be on campus. As such, we have to maintain a proxy log-in system that verifies that off-campus log-ins to databases are from students, faculty, or staff only. We don’t allow community users to have usernames and passwords to access our databases from their homes. Unless you are on campus, the idea is that access is supposed to be limited or that we are to redirect you to a local public library.

"The list of databases that I think are helpful:

EBSCOHost - EBSCO is an umbrella ‘database’ containing many different subject databases under it. There are seven sub-databases within EBSCO to which we are subscribed and that are related to health, psychology, development, and the other areas of interest to you:

-CINAHL Complete (nursing and allied health journals)

-Alt HealthWatch (complementary, holistic, and integrated approaches to healthcare)

-Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition (academic journals in the medical discipline)

-Health Source: Consumer Edition (general, consumer-related health) 

-SPORTDiscus w/ Full Text (sports and sports medicine journals, with some other allied health material included)

-PsycINFO (database of abstracts from the American Psychological Association – many of the full text articles can be found in other databases)

-Academic Search Complete (massive multi-disciplinary database, containing citations, abstracts, and full text articles)

- Directory of Open Access Journals – contains a few thousand health/medicine/psychology journals and full text articles

- ScienceDirect – a large database of science- and social science-related journals; contains over 4,500 journal titles in the area of health sciences (as well as a number more in areas of immunology, neurology, genetics, etc.)

- JSTOR – contains over 600 medicine and allied health journal titles and over 300 titles related to psychology. JSTOR generally approaches journals by digitizing the oldest volume first and then coming forward, unlike others who tend to start digitizing with the more recent issues and working their way back toward the beginning of the a periodical’s run.

- ProjectMUSE – contains a small collection related to health and medicine – our subscription contains 18 journals and about 900 electronic books. Others are related to areas of women’s studies, gender, sexuality, and social sciences.

- ProQuest – our subscription contains five sub-databases related to health; not all of these are as helpful as previous databases. They include:

-AIDS and Cancer Research Abstracts

-COS Conference Papers Index (a collection of scientific papers presented at academic conferences around the world)

-Health and Safety Science Abstracts (publications related to industrial health, public health, hygiene, etc.)

-MedLine – a service of the U.S. National Medical Library – basically a repackaging of PubMed, though with some limitations; we recommend accessing PubMed directly through its own site for full functionality

-TOXLINE – another service of the U.S. National Medical Library – related to all areas of toxicology, pharmacology, pesticides and environmental agents, etc.

- PubMed – the database providing open access to medical research, papers, and studies funded by the government

"The problem with PubMed and with other databases that provide abstracts and citations only is that the full text of the article may exist in a different database to which the institution is not subscribed. For example, Wesleyan isn’t in a financial position to subscribe to electronic resources provided through Elsevier. That’s not to say that their resources wouldn’t be useful for our students, but we’ve made a determination that the cost of the database outweighs the benefit and/or possibility of covering some resources in other databases. We also have a robust interlibrary loan program that can provide relatively quick access to journal materials to which we don’t have electronic access. The other trick with databases in general is that one may provide an abstract or citation only, but not the full text. We have a separate database of journal titles to which we are subscribed, which allows me to check whether a citation in one database may exist as a full-text article in a different one.

"I did a search in PubMed using just the author’s last name you provided (Rovee-Collier) and turned up 93 citations, of which only 6 were full-text available through PubMed. In this case, I would take the journal titles that turned up as citations only and search them against our journal title list to see if we are subscribed either in print or electronically through a different database. For instance, my search turned up an article titled, “The Social Context of Imitation in Infancy” which was published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. It is not full-text in PubMed, so I searched Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in our Journal search page and discovered that we have access to it through a database called ScienceDirect. I can then link directly into that database, track down the article I need using the citation information from PubMed, and then either read, download, or print it. 

"This is where the benefit of an aggregated search tool (like Discovery) really becomes apparent. Rather than having to search two or three different places to find where an article ‘lives’ (and sometimes articles live in strange databases where you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find them), Discovery will pull the full text and make it available from wherever it exists among our electronic collections.

"I have to admit that I’m not clear on how official affiliation with the National Library of Medicine would impact what access you can have to their materials. In the case of Rovee-Collier’s 200+ articles published, it’s entirely possible that many of them have not been indexed or made available online yet. There’s a massive amount of published journal material out there and many databases, though large, have only scratched the surface of what could be digitized. PubMed, though quite substantial, isn’t the only medical database in the game and it’s quite possible that other journal publishers saw an opportunity to make money by licensing their material to other database companies. In that case, it’s also possible that PubMed hasn’t indexed all of Rovee-Collier’s articles yet.

"So in the end, it’s a complicated matter of economics and control of access. The best bet for folks looking for more scientific material is to find some way to affiliate themselves with an academic library at a school with a health science, nursing, or medical program. These schools are the likeliest to have the access to databases and aggregated search tools to support their curricula and which would be of greatest value to you. Public libraries can ILL [interlibrary loan] materials for you, but it’s many times more limited and may have a cost associated with it.

"I’m horrified by how long this response is, but I hope it’s at least a little bit helpful. Please feel free to follow up if you have other questions."

Brett T. Miller ('06)
Archivist, Coordinator of Records Management, & Music Librarian
Annie Merner Pfeiffer Library
West Virginia Wesleyan College
59 College Avenue
Buckhannon, WV 26201
Desk: 304.473.8601

via Debra Swank, RN BSN IBCLC
Ocala, Florida USA


 

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