Swain Library News

Most publishers now offer full-text searching for their journals. Deciding where to search — a publisher site or an index is a key decision that impacts what is retrieved. Article level information on publisher sites may be “invisible” to web search engines such as Google. Because web search engines crawl publishers’ sites periodically, you are only searching “snapshots” rather than retrieving the latest information available.

Below are some advantages and disadvantages of doing a full-text search of journal articles on a publisher’s web site.

Advantages:

• No lag time between time of publication and when article can be searched
• Ability to search entire contents of an issue, not just research articles
• Ability to search the entire text of an article by keyword (helpful for finding information about laboratory methods)
• Helps provide quality control (e.g. all articles are refereed)
• Efficient method to verify a citation
• No search fees

Disadvantages:

• Possible to miss relevant research without searching multiple sites
• Using only keywords to search subjects can cause you to miss important articles and/or get too many irrelevant items
• Inconsistent data (e.g. author names) may make it difficult to find all relevant articles
• Potential gaps in coverage (early years may not be included)

Links to selected journal publisher sites are available on Swain’s Alerts page

A more comprehensive journals list is also available from Cambridge University

See also: Song Yu. 2004. “Not Just Full-Text Articles: Comparing the Search Function Among Chemistry Electronic Journals’ Web Sites.” Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, Winter 2004. URL: http://www.istl.org/04-winter/refereed.html

Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 10:28 am

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