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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
In the last decade, online databases in the field of women and gender studies have matured. There are now a variety of bibliographic and full text databases available, both free on the Internet and through fee-based subscriptions. This article provides an in-depth analysis of three major fee-based databases: Women's Studies International, Contemporary Women's Issues, and GenderWatch. The author compares the databases by searching a core list of scholarly journals and feminist magazines to determine the coverage in each system including dates, number of citations for each periodical title, and whether full text is available for each title. The author also analyzes article coverage from those periodical titles common to all three systems for a specific year to determine which database provides the most comprehensive coverage. This analysis will provide libraries with a means to determine which of these databases will be most beneficial to their clientele, and it will encourage librarians with responsibility for selecting women's studies online resources to advocate for more comprehensive inclusion of women's studies journals in key databases.
INTRODUCTION
The field of women's studies is now a mature discipline. Hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States offer undergraduate minors and majors, and several offer graduate degrees. Along with the maturation of the discipline has come the evolution of the bibliographic literature, including online resources. In the last ten to fifteen years, online databases for women and gender studies have multiplied. There are now a variety of digitized full text resources; indexing and abstracting sources; and databases providing the full text of journals, newsletters, reports, and grey literature. For an excellent up-to-date listing of the multiple women's studies electronic resources available, see the Web site Electronic Resources Information and Assessment (http://www.libr.org/wss/projects/ electronic.html) compiled by the Electronic Resources and Access Committee of the Women's Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
This article provides an in-depth analysis of the coverage of core women's studies journals in three fee-based databases: Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI), GenderWatch (GW), and Women's Studies International (WSI). The author compares these databases by searching a core list of women and gender studies journals to determine the coverage in each system, including the dates of coverage and number of citations for each periodical title. For Contemporary Women's Issues and GenderWatch, which both provide full text, the author examines a sample of journals common to both databases to determine the level of full text availability for these journals.
This type of in-depth analysis of online databases is important for several reasons. First, public libraries and smaller college or university libraries cannot subscribe to a wide variety of databases. For those libraries wishing to subscribe to a database for gender studies, comparisons such as this assist smaller libraries in making informed decisions about which database is best for their clientele. Second, for libraries fortunate enough to subscribe to more than one gender-related database, it is important to know the coverage for each database in order to provide the best service to users. Third, many libraries faced with budget cuts make journal cancellation decisions based on coverage of a journal in an online database. In order to make truly informed decisions, subject specialists and fund managers need to know the real extent of the full text coverage in online databases.
LITERATURE REVIEW
In 1984, Sarah Pritchard, then Reference Specialist in Women's Studies at the Library of Congress, wrote an article titled "Developing Criteria for Database Evaluation: The Example of Women's Studies." This paper reviewed the current literature of the time on evaluation of database content to determine specific criteria to guide the development of women's studies databases. Women Online: Research in Women's Studies Using Online Databases (Atkinson & Hudson, 1990) presents one of the earliest analyses of the coverage of women's studies content in online databases. Each chapter discusses a different topic relating to the availability of women's studies resources in online systems, such as the coverage of women in biomedical databases; women's issues found in business databases; the coverage of lesbians and women of color in online databases; or the availability of online information about women in developing countries. Two articles from the mid-1990s discuss the coverage of women's studies rifles in the table of contents or current awareness services. Koch and Preece (1995) compared the coverage of women's studies titles found in the print-only publication Feminist Periodicals in three current awareness services: Current Contents, UnCover, and Contents First. Faries (1998) undertook a similar study that compared the print tables of contents to the online tables of contents for a core set of women's studies journals in three online table-of-contents resources. When women's studies databases first began to appear as CD-ROMS, several reviews and descriptive articles were written about them (Dickstein, Evans, German, Grim, & River, 1998; Duval, 1998; Kinder, 1998; Kushigian, 1997). A recent article in Library Journal (Golderman & Connolly, 2004) reviewed several databases related to women and gender studies, while Fang (2002) provides an overview of Ethnic News Watch and GenderWatch. Finally, Dickstein and Hovendick (2004) provide an excellent article in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science on the history and development of women's studies electronic resources.
Other articles, too numerous to mention, have looked at the coverage of journals in a variety of online resources. However, there has not been an in-depth study of the coverage of women's studies journals in the women's studies aggregator databases.
METHODOLOGY
The author compared forty core women's studies periodical titles in three online women's studies databases, Contemporary Women's Issues, GenderWatch, and Women's Studies International (WSI). The forty titles were determined by the Collection Development Committee of the Women's Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. These titles were chosen after much discussion and debate within the committee.
The list of the forty core titles is presented in Table 1, which includes the full name of the journal; the year when the first publication appeared; and the ISBN number. The key research questions that the author wished to answer were as follows:
* Which core titles are included in each database?
* What are the dates of coverage for each title?
* How many citations/records appear in each database from each title?
* In Contemporary Women's Issues and GenderWatch, which of the journals covered are available full text and what is the extent of the full text coverage in both systems?
The three databases have now been around for several years and are available from different vendors. Contemporary Women's Issues began as an online resource and a compact disc from Responsive Database Services (RDS) in 1996. Contemporary Women's Issues "brings together relevant content from mainstream periodicals, 'grey' literature, and the alternative press--with a focus on the critical issues and events that influence women's lives in more than 190 countries" (Thomson Gale, n.d.). Contemporary Women's Issues contains more than two thousand unique sources, including periodicals, newsletters, NGO reports and other ephemeral literature. The database is updated weekly, includes coverage of titles back to 1992, and provides 98 percent full text availability of articles. CWI is available from Gale, OCLC FirstSearch, and Lexis Nexis. GenderWatch began as an online resource and CD-ROM from Softline in 1997. It provides "researchers with more than 100,000 articles on wide-ranging topics like sexuality, religion, societal roles, feminism, masculinity, eating disorders, day care, and the workplace" (ProQuest, n.d.). Some articles in GenderWatch date back to 1970, although the majority of titles date from 1992. Information from the ProQuest Web site says that GenderWatch includes articles from journals, magazines, newsletters, newspapers, books, conference proceedings, and special reports. GW is updated quarterly. The Web site does not say what percentage of titles is available full text. Women's Studies International "supports curriculum development in the areas of sociology, history, political science & economy, public policy, international relations, arts & humanities, business and education" (NISC, n.d.). This resource provides access to over eight hundred sources including journals, newspapers,...
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