June 2005 — Exclusive
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Electronic Full-Text Journal Articles: Convenience or Compromise
Multidisciplinary library databases index hundreds of journals and provide the full-text of many articles. The producers of these aggregator databases-such as InfoTrac (Expanded Academic ASAP and Info Trac School Edition), EBSCO (MAS Ultra-School Edition and Academic Search Elite), and ProQuest (Periodical Abstracts)-pull together hundreds of journals from all fields, make them accessible with
an attractive interface, and market them to libraries with the promise of providing instant entrée to the world of scholarly articles.
The educational community has enthusiastically embraced these full-text databases. The ability to retrieve complete articles through a library's Web site has imparted a new level of convenience to traditional research. But the full-text articles have become so popular that users are reluctant to confront their downsides; as a result, they jeopardize the effectiveness of their research. Therefore, educators must understand and communicate the scope and limitations of full-text databases in order to enable their students to become contentious consumers of electronic information.
Web vs. Web
Until recently, library databases came only in print or CD-ROM format. Because these resources were housed in the library, students were rarely confused about who provided the sources and what their scope and authority was. But now that libraries mount resources on their Web pages, confusion reigns. Subscription databases cost thousands of dollars, but seamless access makes it difficult for students to understand that articles retrieved through these databases differ substantially from those located free with a Google search. Peer-reviewed, scholarly journal articles appear the same as anonymous Web pages simply because they both can be printed from a computer. Students consult non-authoritative sites instead of referred journal articles and do not understand the difference.
Commercialization of Information
In the past, scholars relied on printed indexes to locate citations to articles on specific subjects. While publishers of periodical indexes select the journals to include by soliciting the recommendations of subject specialists, only prestigious journals are included in standard indexes. Inclusion in an electronic aggregator database, in contrast, is not a sign of quality but the sign of a business contract between the journal publisher and the database provider. Users of databases are no longer reviewing only the discipline's premiere journals. On the contrary, in the race to provide access to the most journals, some databases obscure the best articles by overwhelming the user with material that is neither respected nor relevant. As a result, the responsibility to identify the most appropriate resources is shifted from the experts in the discipline to the users-often students who lack the skill to separate the acceptable from the unacceptable.
Information Overload
Massive databases that combine articles from every discipline can overwhelm users with information. In the past, students automatically limited their searches to resources in a specific discipline, format, or level by selecting which index to use. Now, searching these conglomerations of diverse journals can retrieve articles about Plato that have nothing to do with philosophy, or articles on ghosts that relate to computers rather than phantoms.
