Session / Exercise 10: Research Information Finding Aids Introduction As you now know, a social science discipline's research gets itself circulated among the scholars in that area through several informal (conferences, proceedings of papers presented, etc.) and formal means of dissemination. The formal mechanisms include research reports, academic degree by-products (theses and dissertations), scholarly journal articles, monographs and some types of books. What we intent to introduce you to in this session are some of the large number of comprehensive, recurrent bibliographies that exist and that will be helpful to you in exploring some topic. First, however, we need for you to consider the major bibliographic devices that you can use to track down topics and concepts that are not yet formally published--bibliographic control of conference papers, unpublished research reports, and academic theses and dissertations. A. Unpublished Research Reports There are some bibliographic tools that specialize in different formats of not-yet-published research findings, including conference papers and presentations, research reports, and academic doctoral dissertations. This section of this session is about those bibliographic tools. Before going on however, it is extremely important to point out to you that there are other regular bibliographic tools that sometimes cover portions of these pre-publication materials as well. These are what we usually think of as those other places: the standard disciplinary or multi- or inter-disciplinary comprehensive, recurrent bibliographies (Anthropological Literature, Business and Industry, EconLit, ERIC, Psychological Abstracts, Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS), Sociological Abstracts, etc.). Those will be taken up in the second section of this session's material. This part, however, is going to specialize in those few bibliographic sources that can assist you in determining whether some pre-publication record exists that describes the methods and results of a research project that has taken place but has yet to be reported through the standard scholarly journal literature.
There is a vital, must-be-known-and-used tool for the appearance of doctoral dissertations at most higher education institutions across the United States and Canada and at least partial coverage of the rest of the world: Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI). Using the name of its online service, Digital Dissertations, DAI says this about itself:
Don't get the idea that Digital Dissertations is THE single, final resource to check to see if a dissertation was completed on a topic you are searching for; it isn't. But, it is the only single resource to go to to get coverage of the most complete listing of dissertations completed at most dissertation-granting institutions in the US. You see, not all institutions require that their doctoral students submit their final products to DAI for inclusion in that bibliographic service. Most do, of course, but not absolutely all. When you first attach to Digital Dissertations (in OU Libraries LORA database services, of course), you are given this handy bit of information too:
In other words, you have access to pdf copies of many (but not all) of the dissertations whose bibliographic information you are looking at. What you should remember, before going through the procedure of getting one (or more than one), is that there is an citation+abstract viewing level, as well as a "preview" mode of retrieval that will allow you to see the first 24 pages of the dissertation to assist you in determining whether you actually want the whole dissertation or not. If you wish to see the whole dissertation, you fill in a form that asks for your email address. To that address, ProQuest (the company that owns Digital Dissertations) will email you a four digit PIN number and the url that you should click on. When you are at that page, and have correctly entered your four digit PIN number, you are told to click on the Adobe Acrobat icon next to the citation of the dissertation you requested. When you do that, the copy downloads to your computer's Adobe Acrobat Viewer (which must be on your machine, by the way! Remember, we warned you about needing to have Adobe Acrobat's viewer installed on your microcomputer). After a few seconds, you have your copy of the dissertation. Please remember, however, what was mentioned to you before: that there are other bibliographic resources that may cover dissertations as well. When we go over comprehensive recurrent bibliographies such as periodical indexing services, disciplinary indexing and abstracting services, and multi- or interdisciplinary services, you should check to see if the service you are using includes doctoral dissertations in its scope of coverage.
The federal government, of course, facilitates a good portion of research that takes place in the US by requested that it be done and by funding it. A federal agency that has, since the 60's and 70's, been in the business of collecting, organizing, and distributing those "technical reports" (on the non-need-to-know side of the ledger) has been the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), part of the US. Department of Commerce. A few years ago, NTIS was told to move to a more cost-recovery basis, so its services, which were essentially free to the citizens of the United States, began to be delivered on a charged basis. However, you need to know what information about research performed under government contract is available, either to pay for copies of the research reports, or to follow up on what you have found out through investigating the NTIS database by checking for earlier and later work by the same principal investigator(s). In other words, if you find something in NTIS that suggests that Francis Smith, from Univ of Alabama, had a contract on testing a better way of making something-or-other, you could then search the "open" literature (periodical indexing services, disciplinary bibliographies, etc, etc) to see if the same author is mentioned there, or if the author has given papers or presentations on the same topic. The NTIS site is located out on the open Internet, here: NTIS
There are two databases available through the OU Libraries LORA service (Library Online Resource Access) that you should think about in relationship to pre-published reports read or delivered:
PapersFirst is a database (one of the FirstSearch service's set of databases) that indexes papers presented at conferences or congresses, or symposia, or expositions, or meetings worldwide. It is a service called out by the British Library Document Supply Centre, and made available through the FirstSearch service. Proceedings is another FirstSearch database, this one covering published proceedings at every congress, symposium, conference, exposition, workshop and meeting received by the same British service, the British Library Document Supply Centre. Each record in the database contains a list of the papers presented at each conference. B. Published Research
(Journal Articles, Monographs, Books): The category of original research findings is, by far, the largest category of materials to be controlled bibliographically. This includes all of the categories one usually thinks of when carrying out a search for materials in a "library" search: journal articles, monographs, and fuller, more complete, larger studies reported in book-length treatments. The category of bibliography that does the best, most up-to-date job of keeping researchers informed about these materials are recurrent bibliographies. Specifically, most of these tools are known as comprehensive recurrent bibliographies. What's in a name?
So, by comprehensive recurrent bibliography we mean those bibliographic tools that are up-to-date on bringing to their users the new additions to a discipline's or multi-disciplinary area's research front. They keep their reader's/user's up-to-date with respect to the research output of some domain of knowledge.
There are a lot of comprehensive recurrent bibliographies that have subject scopes much broader than just the social sciences. In fact, the greatest number of bibliographic tools that exist are general, cross-disciplinary tools. Our point is: you can not complete a good search for some topic by staying away from these general-coverage tools; you must use them. In this category of tools like ArticleFirst, Web of Science, and WorldCat. ArticleFirst, which is a periodical indexing service, includes journals that are across the disciplinary spectrum, from the Arts, and Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Sciences. Some of the articles it indexes are of interest to a student working on a term paper for a social sciences class, but much of its content is not about the social sciences. The same is true of WorldCat, that huge catalog of the collections of hundreds and hundreds of academic libraries. Some of the its materials are relevant to a student of the social sciences; much of it is not. Of course, this warning of the general, larger scope of these tools is not to say don't use them. It is to say that they will include materials that are outside of the area the user is looking for. Please don't forget to use them!
There are, of course, comprehensive recurrent tools that are inside of the social sciences, at the level of the discipline, or multi-disciplinary. Examples of disciplinary tools are ABI/Inform (Business), America: History and Life (History), EconLit (Economics), ERIC (Education), and PsychInfo (Psychology). Many of these tools use subject terminology that differs from the Library of Congress subject headings used in most academic libraries for their online catalogs. Users of these disciplinary tools will need to make sure they know how to use the different controlled vocabulary systems likely to be used within each of these tools.
In order for you to see a reorganized view of the database services (the indexing services available through OU Libraries' LORA service) that are available to you for searching purposes, we have presented them in three categories on a special page: (You will also note a link for them on the Find It on the Web page, http://www.ou.edu/webhelp/, down under the third category, "How to Make the best use of the tools & services available through OU Libraries." The page is labeled: The three categories we use to organize these bibliographic tools are:
Particularly frustrating to you will be the fact that some of these tools can be difficult--some, frustratingly difficult--to use effectively for searching purposes since, as you have already seen, each vendor of a database seems to been intent on divining its own search/retrieval interface to "help" its users. You may complain if you wish, but you need to understand that the publishing of reference and bibliographic tools is not a competitive marketplace, and the vendors just really don't care much that you dislike their search interface. With that in mind, however, you are being introduced to THE major comprehensive recurrent bibliographic tools in this session (Indexing & Abstraction databases at OU).
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