E-Views and Reviews: SAGE's Targeted Collections

By Cheryl LaGuardia -- Library Journal, 3/1/2005

Education: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Psychology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
SAGE Publications
www.sagefulltext.com

The SAGE Full-Text Collections are research databases of popular, peer-reviewed journals in a variety of subjects ranging across the social sciences, sciences, and engineering. Other SAGE Collections include Criminology (LJ 4/15/04), Communication Studies (LJ 10/1/03), and Sociology (LJ 9/15/03).

Both the Education and Psychology collections offer full text for leading journals in their respective fields. Education provides 19 journals, with files ranging back as far as 23 years. The Psychology collection contains 30 journals, with files going back as far as 35 years. For complete listing of journals, see the web site.

How Do They Work? SAGE Collections use the CSA search interface, and for this review I worked with both the old Internet Database Service (IDS) interface as well as the newly released CSA Illumina platform. I'll report comparative results.

However, the look and feel of the new screens in Illumina are terrific. The Quick Search screen is wonderful: clear and uncluttered, it makes excellent use of tasteful colors that lead the eye to the right parts of the screen. It gives the wildcard symbol tip in an example (e-resource producers: Please do this!) and lets you change database or subject and search by date range via drop-down menus. The color tabs at screen top make sure you know there are more options, including Advanced Search and Search Tools. These include Combining Searches, setting up your personal profile for alerts, a search history, a command search mode, thesaurus searching, and index searching. Advanced Search gives you nine search boxes to combine terms, as well as the ability to limit results to latest update, journal articles only, or English only. And you can add rows of search boxes, too; I stopped after adding eight, but that will afford some very fine-tuned searching.

The IDS system lets you do the same operations, but the way the screen is laid out, you must look for them. Also, the basic two-tone color of IDS missed the opportunity to highlight action portions of the screen's real estate.

Can You and Your Patrons Use Them? My first search was via IDS in the Education file: a Quick Search for "learning styles." I got 23 full-text articles from the Education Collection coming from five different journals as well as three "Web Resources Related to the Social Sciences/Humanities." The articles ranged from adult learning styles to cognitive theory to learning style inventories to questionnaires. The records for the articles contain a wealth of information: email addresses of authors, detailed abstracts, Digital Object Identifiers, and the references from the article.

In the Illumina single search box, I entered learning styles and received 374 results. Why so many more? I have no idea but assume it searched many more fields. The results included 308 journal articles (298 are peer reviewed), four conferences, three web sites (the same as in IDS), and 62 "Others," which turned out to include book reviews, case studies, and editorials from the journals in the Education Collection.

I tried Advanced Searches in Education via both IDS and Illumina. When I went into IDS Advanced Search, the system gave me the option of doing a Thesaurus Search, which I did, finding "cognitive style" to be the term used in the ERIC Thesaurus, here searchable online. I did an Advanced Search for "cognitive style" as a descriptor, with "adults" as a keyword, and got no results in either the IDS system or Illumina. When I redid the search with both terms as keywords ("cognitive style and adults") I got 44 hits via IDS and 44 results via Illumina. When I viewed the results, there were actually only 41 results listed in Illumina because the system had removed duplicate hits. The Illumina results display includes a brief abstract in the record, as well as a link to the table of contents for the issue of the journal in which the article appears.

I decided to try my luck in the Psychology Collection and got mixed results. Via the IDS system, both my Quick Search and Advanced Search for "stress and librarians" yielded few to no results. I tried Thesaurus searching for the terms in both IDS and Illumina and got zilch. However, my search for "stress and librarians" anywhere in Illumina found 183 results, with 19 links to web site reports (all of which seemed to come from Rand Reports on the Gulf War).

How Good is it? For content alone I would give these collections an eight, but add the new Illumina system—which I give an enthusiastic ten—and overall I would rate these as strong nines. As the collections grow, and with Illumina presumably affording greater access to web-based information, that rating will rise accordingly.

What's the Cost? The Education Collection charter price (available through 3/31/05) is $10,200. The Psychology Collection charter price (also available through 3/31/05) is $18,200.

The Bottom Line Highly recommended for college libraries and medium to large public libraries: you will find these collections useful as a substitute for print and to serve remote users effectively.