E-Views and Reviews: Dollars and Sense

The Encyclopedia-Off, Round 5 Encyclopaedia Britannica Online blew away Wikipedia in this week's reference question: find material on Restoration plays. A search in Britannica found 165 results, including a section on Restoration theater within a 93-page scholarly article citing important theater companies of the period as well as playwrights and theaters. A search in Wikipedia found “no page with that title,” but offered 19,853 other results, the first of which was a “stub” of 100 percent relevance, for the play Restoration Comedy by Amy Freed. The score so far: Britannica 1, Wikipedia 4.

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EBSCO; www.epnet.com

EconLit™ with Full Text is an enhanced version of EconLit Online, which indexes over 600 publications including journal articles, essays, proceedings, dissertations, working papers, and book reviews. In addition to including the full text for 400 bonus publications, this version has titles from the American Economic Association (such as American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, and Journal of Economic Perspectives), as well as some non-English-language publications. The indexing and abstracting go back to 1969, while full text is available selectively.

How Does It Work? The EBSCOhost search screen is well known for being easy and powerful to use. You can do a Basic search just by entering search terms in a single box and then limiting or expanding the search from that screen. Advanced search gives you all those options within three search boxes, plus the ability to limit your search by geographic descriptor or geographic region. For this review, I also enabled the “Autocomplete Keyword Search Suggestions,” a new feature in EBSCOhost.

My only cavil with EBSCOhost is that the brand eclipses the identity of the database being searched. I wish EBSCO would highlight the title (or titles, when you have multiple subscriptions and are searching multiple files) better than it does presently. The plain, unadorned text of the file name dislimns on this otherwise well-designed screen.

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? My first Basic Search for “direct foreign investment” located 419 articles, the most recent from June 2006. When I refined the search by limiting it to articles with full text, I got 75 results, the most recent being June 2005. Given experience with the time it still takes for articles to be published in scholarly/academic economics journals, that's not bad.

Next I tried an Advanced search for “direct foreign investment” as a Subject and combined it with “U.S.” as a geographic descriptor. I got 15 dead-on hits, two of which were available with full text, one from September 2003 and another from September 1998. In addition, along the left-hand side of the screen was an array of ten suggestions for “narrowing” the search by subject, ranging from “International Investment: Long-term Capital Movements” to “Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, and Changes.”

How Good Is It? The add-ons such as the ability to limit by geographic descriptor increase the value of this authoritative source. Although it gets a strong 10 for content, the hefty price (below) brings the rating down when one considers that libraries serving economists already own most of this content. Since many economists in academia are members of the American Economic Association (AEA), librarians should be aware that, according to a statement on AEA's web site, the association will soon be providing EconLit™ to its members. This should have some impact on the future cost—and rating for libraries—of this file. For now, it gets an overall 9.6.

What's the Cost? An annual subscription for EconLit™ with Full Text ranges from $3900 to $12,500 for single sites, depending on the type and size of the institution, as well as the combination of other EBSCOhost databases purchased.

The Bottom Line EconLit™ with Full Text is highly recommended for all libraries serving economists and students in economics, and EBSCO serves it up well. Be on the alert, though, for changes in subscription pricing if, indeed, the AEA provides direct service of the file to its members.