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Article Excerpt
The recent economic downturn has caused, and undoubtedly will continue to cause, cutbacks in the budgets of libraries worldwide.
While some savings may come out of operations, many cuts will need to come from collections and may include indexes, databases, data sets, journal subscriptions, etc. While this is obviously dismal news, it is also an opportunity to explore alternative means of obtaining duplicate or analogous information sources for library users. Fiscal exigency is a good time to examine traditional assumptions and priorities. Just because a commercial database costs a lot of money and has always been available as a library resource does not mean it is necessarily better than a freely available resource. Habit alone can no longer justify automatic continuation. Librarians who have not systematically looked for resources outside their library networks may be surprised by the depth of information now freely available on the open web.
Additionally, college students and employees of some businesses and organizations often enjoy an information-rich environment courtesy of their institutional library. However, upon graduation or loss of employment, they typically lose access to library databases and all the commercial information sources previously available to them. Many working professionals don't have access to any institutional library or commercial information resources. Astute individuals may explore university alumni privileges or the resources of the nearest, large public library, but these options may not prove sufficient or satisfactory. Librarians may wish to recommend some of the best and most relevant freely available information resources to such clients.
With publishing on the web and open access to science articles becoming more pervasive every day, there are many resources now available that might serve these needs. Comparative studies are demonstrating the strength and value of some freely available resources versus commercial databases. Increasingly users are less willing to go through a library portal to begin their information searches and, instead, start their searches on the open web. This article will explore some of the best freely available science information resources for locating journal articles, books, and gray literature and describe their scope, content, and special features. Reference sources are not specifically covered in this article. To identify additional information resources, both commercial ones and those freely available on the web, and to keep current with new developments, we suggest that you review library database lists and library subject guides.
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Journal articles remain the primary way that researchers in most science fields communicate their research and discoveries. While great for finding all kinds of miscellaneous website information, general search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live Search, etc., do not typically work well for comprehensively searching the science literature and particularly journal articles. However, Google Scholar is an excellent information resource to begin a search of the scholarly science literature, as are other multidisciplinary, comprehensive indexes. Most of the largest publishers of science journals provide free article index searching. Specialized science search engines provide access to research done by government agencies, universities, corporations, etc. Depending on the subject or topic, there are many specialized information resources. While searching for information, it helps to store citations and associated documents and then to create and share bibliographies. This list of resources is selective and highlights those thought to be of the highest quality and value; however, it is certainly not a comprehensive list.
Commercial products or services exist for most of the below categories. These include Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier) for comprehensive, multidisciplinary indexes and all the journal publishers listed in the ejournal package category. Subscribed or paid access to journal publisher resources can offer the obvious advantage that, in addition to indexed article citations, you gain direct access to complete articles. The many databases and providers for the subject-specific resources include Academic Search Premier (EBSCO), Biological Abstracts (Thomson Reuters), Biological Sciences (ProQuest), Biosis Previews (Thomson Reuters), CAB Abstracts (CABI), EMBASE (Elsevier), Engineering Village (Elsevier), Environment Complete (EBSCO), Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management (ProQuest), Fish and Fisheries Worldwide (NISC), GeoRef (American Geological Institute), IEEE Explore (IEEE), Inspec (The Institution of Engineering and Technology), MathSciNet (American Mathematical Society), Scifinder (Chemical Abstract Services), Wildlife and Ecology Studies Worldwide (NISC), and Zoological Record (Thomson Reuters). Commercial databases undoubtedly save the researcher time and may provide other significant advantages, such as higher-quality interfaces, better search features, easier linking to articles, thesauri, lists of journals indexed, training guides and tutorials, and the ability to federate searches of multiple individual databases. For handling search results, popular commercial, bibliographic management programs include Endnote and Endnote Web from Thomson Reuters, and RefWorks from ProQuest.
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Some of the information resources listed below provide links to articles or sources that are open access or otherwise freely available on the web. Additional internet searching may also locate a closely related pre- or post-print of an article or some other available draft edition of the work. Once you find a relevant article, book, or other kind of information source for your topic, you can then "grow" search results by scouring the bibliography and capturing older sources. Conversely, you can also increase search results by searching citation tracking tools, such as Google Scholar, to see if the known relevant article or book has been cited by other researchers, thereby capturing newer sources.
However, some sources--especially journal articles--are still only available through subscriptions or purchase. Options for obtaining articles or other sources not available on the open web include visiting the largest nearby library (public or academic) that serves residents of the city, county, or state, as it may provide onsite access or allow borrowing via interlibrary loan service. You might also consider purchasing individual articles via a commercial document delivery provider. For example, many publishers sell access to articles, as do some document delivery...
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