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Choice
Library
Journal, NetConnect, July 2002
Review from: CHOICE, September 2003
This is
the newest version of a family of databases that began in print as General Science Index (1978),
the first science index aimed at high school and beginning college
students. Coverage included popular science titles (Science
News), popular environmental magazines (Living
Wilderness), and scholarly titles in "astronomy, atmospheric
science, biology, botany, chemistry, conservation, earth science,
environment, food & nutrition, genetics, health & medicine, mathematics,
microbiology, oceanography, physics, physiology and zoology." ....Since
1978, GSI has expanded in size, added abstracts (General
Science Abstracts), gone electronic (both CD-ROM and Web-based)
and most recently added full text. Today, GSFT covers 218 titles (besides
science periodicals it covers The New
York Times Science section) and includes full text for about 60
titles. In nearly 25 years since 1978, 45 titles have been dropped either
because the magazine ceased or as a result of the periodic subscriber
surveys that H.W. Wilson conducts. GSI and its successors have been widely
reviewed and praised (CH, Apr'79, and in Booklist, ARBA, and Library Journal). Although
quality of the abstracts (often author abstracts) and indexing make GSFT
an excellent research tool, full text has made it only marginally stronger
than GSI and GSA....Full-text titles are generally popular or general
science titles and include few scholarly research titles. ....Excellent
but not essential.
Summing Up: Optional. Lower-division undergraduates.
Review
from: Library
Journal, NetConnect, July 2002
Science literacy is not just
important for its own sake. It is necessary to come to grips with the
ethical and public policy issues that are increasingly becoming part of
our daily lives. Students, teachers, librarians, and educated
nonspecialists have been well served for the past quarter century by
Wilson's General Science Index. Its current incarnation as General Science
Full Text makes general science research both significantly less
complicated and more powerful. The product merges Wilson's high-quality
indexing and abstracting with the capability of retrieving--in full
text--a range of resources, from popular science literature through a core
collection of professional research journals.
Content:
Starting as a print index in 1978 and evolving through online and CD-ROM
incarnations, General Science Index is a staple for budding scientific
researchers. Like its precursors, the web-based General Science
Full Text provides indexing--dating back to 1984--to a core group
of English-language science magazines and peer-reviewed professional
journals. Abstracts were first incorporated in 1993. In 1995, Wilson began
full-text coverage for some 65 of about 160 currently indexed titles.
These range from popular magazines such as Discover and Science
News to a selection of annual reviews (in biochemistry, genetics,
physiology, and plant physiology among others) to professional
peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Epidemiology and
The Hastings Center Report.
The database
contains over 600,000 records and is updated monthly. Subjects covered
include astronomy and physics, atmospheric science, chemistry,
conservation and the environment, earth science, food and nutrition, the
life sciences (including genetics, physiology, and health and medicine),
mathematics, oceanography, and physics.
Searchability:
The uncluttered WilsonWeb welcome screen invites visitors to orient
themselves by taking the short QuickTour, or, alternatively, to start
right in by checking the databases they intend to search. Three options
are available--SearchPlus (advanced), Search, or Browse--although the
site's design nudges the searcher toward SearchPlus.
The template
in SearchPlus offers two boxes for search terms, each with the pull-down
option of changing from the default keyword index (Words Anywhere) to
limit searching more precisely to the Subject, Title, Author,
Journal/Source, or ISSN/ISBN fields. Boolean operations between search
statements are handled by clicking the AND, OR, or NOT buttons. Search
results may be restricted to Full Text and Peer Reviewed sources.
Additional limits include Article type (including Autobiography,
Biography, Book-Review, Exhibit, Interview, Obituary, Product-Evaluation,
Symposium, and the somewhat unlikely Recipe) and Publication Year
(including Any, 2002 only, or a user-selected range of dates).
General
Science Full Text,
like many web-based products that have evolved from online databases,
provides users with the tools needed for achieving precise results. These
include nesting, wildcards and truncation, and proximity operators.
What happens
when a searcher puts the capabilities of General Science Full Text to work? A Subject search on human cloning AND ethical aspects
produced 95 hits, 15 of which were available online in full text. Articles
from peer-reviewed journals accounted for more than half of the items in
the results list, and nine of these 56 peer-reviewed articles were
available in full text. (Full text in WilsonWeb means a combination of
conventional text, PDF images, and the somewhat unappealing PDF text.)
The Full Text
and Peer Reviewed limits may also be selected after search results are
posted, and searchers may view results as brief citations or full records
where descriptors, authors' names, and journal name (and issue) are all
hotlinks to facilitate browsing. Marking, printing, saving, and e-mailing
are all supported. The Search Results page also features a link to the
Infotrieve document delivery service, but because it is implemented at the
results level rather than the citation level, bibliographic information
has to be entered manually to place an order. (Infotrieve services start
at $10.75 per document, and the company states that its fill rate is 95
percent.)
Navigation
bars are at the right side and bottom of every page. Revising a search
simply requires clicking on the History navigation button. New search
terms may be added or previous ones combined or removed by checking the
search statement number and clicking the appropriate button.
Context-sensitive Help is also accessible via the Navigation bar (and
Wilson posts a 16-page Quick Reference Guide to WilsonWeb on its homepage
in the Technical Support area).
The basic
Search mode employs a single search term box and eliminates refinements
such as searching in the Journal/Source and ISSN/ISBN fields, specifying
full-text and peer-reviewed sources, and limiting by article type. Date
searching remains, though limiting to the current year with a single click
gives way to searching by a range of dates. Browse mode, in fact, offers
superior options for refining a simple search, with pull-down Peer
Reviewed Journal and Document Type supplementing the standard Author Name,
Subject, and Journal Name searches. A multifaceted search is beyond the
capabilities of Browse mode, however.
There are a
number of variations on the basic product. Wilson itself offers the
database in WilsonWeb and WilsonDisc for Windows CD-ROM versions with
indexing-only, indexing and abstracting, and full-text options available
in both formats.
General
Science Index
is part of the basic OCLC FirstSearch package, but subscribers may upgrade
to the version with abstracts. (Selective full text is available in both.)
Interestingly, a basic search on bioterrorism conducted in the
WilsonWeb version of the product and in the FirstSearch General
Science Index revealed that even though abstracts could not be
viewed in FirstSearch, they were still being searched. As far as currency
goes, the WilsonWeb database contained 32 articles of more recent vintage
than the OCLC version. Dialog File 98 offers the same indexing and
abstracting coverage as WilsonWeb, including selected full text from 1995.
Those who prefer Ovid or SilverPlatter interfaces can get the
indexing-only version or the database with abstracts.
Price:
The single-user annual rate for General Science Full Text
for a college with nearly 2300 FTE would be $2530; two to four
simultaneous users boosts the subscription price to $3,795, and five to
eight users would cost $4,435. Contact H.W. Wilson for more specific
information. Free 30-day trials of all WilsonWeb products are available.
Who Needs It? The highly accessible General Science Full Text is a
nearly ideal resource for student researchers (middle school through high
school) and their teachers, nonscience majors in college, and the general
public interested in science. With content that ranges from news and
popularized treatments of science topics through peer-reviewed
professional journals, there is enough substance to satisfy the research
and information needs of many types of users. AP science students will
start bumping against the product's upper limits soon enough, as will
undergraduate science majors, and the Web of Science and BIOSIS Previews
crowd will obviously have to turn to professional-level databases to meet
their research needs. The genius of General Science Full Text
is that it doesn't purport to serve everyone but rather attempts to match
content to the nonspecialist's level of comprehension. Within these
parameters, it is a successful, highly serviceable resource.
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