eReviews: SocINDEX with Full Text

EBSCO, www.ebscohost.com

Updated weekly, SocINDEX with Full Text (SIFT) is a sociology database made up of nearly two million records covering 5000 journals. Full text is provided for more than 400 journals dating back to 1908, as well as over 700 books, with the full text of nearly 7000 conference papers. The file also includes 10,000-plus author profiles for the most cited/searched authors, plus a nearly 20,000-term thesaurus.

Abstracts are available for about 900 journals dating back to 1895. Searchable cited references are available for some titles selectively. Related subjects that are covered include criminology and criminal justice, demography, ethnic and racial studies, gender studies, marriage and the family, political sociology, religion, and substance abuse.

HOW DOES IT WORK? The EBSCOhost search system lets you do Basic and Advanced searches, the main difference being that an Advanced search lets you specify terms in several different fields within the same search. In both types of searches, you can limit your results to full-text articles, those with references available, or those with images; to peer-reviewed titles; or by publication date, publication type, or page length. An array of links at screen top take users to the list of publications, subject terms, author profiles, cited references, and indexes.

CAN YOU USE IT? I decided to try a Visual Search, for "librarians and human rights." The search gave me seven results, which I displayed in both block and column formats. That was about as far as I went with Visual Search, since the blocks and columns confused and annoyed me. So I went back in and did a Basic Search for "librarians and human rights," got the seven results, scanned them quickly, found what I was looking for, added them to my folder, and e-mailed them to myself—all in about 25 seconds.

Next I did an Advanced Search for "Colombia and human rights" and found 78 results, some of which were more on target than others. So I used the terms in Narrow Results by Subject at screen left to do a more focused search on the terms "Colombia" and "human rights" as subject terms and narrowed the search to 20 articles, for eight of which full text was available, three of which had cited references, and 18 of which included abstract summaries. I went back in and looked over the cited references, then pulled up a couple of them in the database; they led me to much more related material.

Then, out of utter curiosity, I did a search for "football" (hey, I live in Massachusetts!) and got 2,323 results. The first was a January 2008 article in Cultural Studies titled "Iranian Women and Football" that "examines football as a site of social contestation for Iranian women." Then there was "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Sport, Identity, and the Confederate Flag in the Dixie South," a 22-page article from the September 2007 issue of Sociology of Sport Journal, and "'Why Can't Girls Play Football?' Gender Dynamics and the Playground," a 16-page article from the August 2007 issue of Sport, Education & Society. Okay, so I got lost in these results for some time—they were fascinating. But as I looked through the listings, I realized there is plenty of international material to be found here.

WHAT'S THE COST? Annual subscriptions for individual institutions are based on FTE as well as your existing subscriptions; they range from $5400 to $16,500. It's not cheap, but it's quite a file.

HOW GOOD IS IT? EBSCO advertises SIFT as "the world's most comprehensive and highest quality sociology research database." And based on quality, ease of use, and comprehensiveness of content, they may just be right. It's a ten.

BOTTOM LINE Recommended for all academic libraries as well as medium to large public libraries and research institutions serving social science scholars.