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COPYRIGHT 2004 Information Today, Inc.
My two picks, the newest version of ISI Web of Science (and ISI Web of Knowledge) and the new Scopus database, represent the state of the art in indexing/abstracting databases. Not only are the databases huge and interdisciplinary, but both are also endowed with cited references, make superb use of citation indexing, and facilitate citation searching, which reduces the need to rely on controlled vocabulary. The pan is SPORTDiscus, which is huge (for a single discipline database), but in an unhealthy way, due to the duplicate and erroneous records that are not removed even after correction. It contains a befuddling thesaurus, which illustrates how frustrating controlled vocabulary searching can be with an inappropriate tool.
ISI WEB OF SCIENCE (WOS)
This summer, Thomson Scientific's ISI Web of Knowledge (WoK) platform and ISI Web of Science (WoS) service got an "interfacelift" that would make Botox aficionados green with envy. The databases also received an overall rejuvenation treatment, with a couple of substantial brain-booster features. One improvement, the Analyze feature, allows users to rank a results set of up to 2,000 records by author, institution name, source title, publication year, subject category, language, or document type, and to see the results in a tabular format along with a histogram. The distribution figures instantly and clearly show the most productive authors, institutions, journals, and subject categories for the topic of your search in a way that would have been appreciated by Bradford and Lotka (who formulated theories about the scatter-distribution of information in scholarly journals and the concentration of authors writing about a specific subject). I can only wish for one more enhancement--an option for analyzing the set by cited journals, cited authors, and cited year.
The other very important cerebral option is the Related Items feature. This...
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