Bibliographic database

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A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts. [1]

Contents

A bibliographic database may cover a wide range of topics or one academic field like computer science. [2] A significant number of bibliographic databases are marketed under a trade name by licensing agreement from vendors, or directly from their makers: the indexing and abstracting services. [3]

Many bibliographic databases have evolved into digital libraries, providing the full text of the organised contents:[ citation needed ]for instance CORE also organises and mirrors scholarly articles and OurResearch develops a search engine for open access content in Unpaywall. [4] Others merge with non-bibliographic and scholarly databases to create more complete disciplinary search engine systems, such as Chemical Abstracts or Entrez.

History

Prior to the mid-20th century, individuals searching for published literature had to rely on printed bibliographic indexes, generated manually from index cards. "During the early 1960s computers were used to digitize text for the first time; the purpose was to reduce the cost and time required to publish two American abstracting journals, the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine and the Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By the late 1960s such bodies of digitized alphanumeric information, known as bibliographic and numeric databases, constituted a new type of information resource. [5] Online interactive retrieval became commercially viable in the early 1970s over private telecommunications networks. The first services offered a few databases of indexes and abstracts of scholarly literature. These databases contained bibliographic descriptions of journal articles that were searchable by keywords in author and title, and sometimes by journal name or subject heading. The user interfaces were crude, the access was expensive, and searching was done by librarians on behalf of 'end users'. [6]

See also

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MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.

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The online public access catalog (OPAC), now frequently synonymous with library catalog, is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Online catalogs have largely replaced the analog card catalogs previously used in libraries.

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an online database of over 16 million astronomy and physics papers developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Abstracts are freely available for most articles, and fully scanned articles may be available in Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and Portable Document Format (PDF). Hosted papers may be from peer reviewed and/or non-peer reviewed sources. ADS is managed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Entrez</span> Cross-database search engine for health sciences

The Entrez Global Query Cross-Database Search System is a federated search engine, or web portal that allows users to search many discrete health sciences databases at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website. The NCBI is a part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is itself a department of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which in turn is a part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The name "Entrez" was chosen to reflect the spirit of welcoming the public to search the content available from the NLM.

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Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is a division of the American Chemical Society. It is a source of chemical information and is located in Columbus, Ohio, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

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Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, commonly known by its acronym RILM, is a nonprofit organization that offers digital collections and advanced tools for locating research on all topics related to music. Its mission is "to make this knowledge accessible to research and performance communities worldwide….to include the music scholarship of all countries, in all languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries, thereby fostering research in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences." Central to RILM's work and mission is the international bibliography of scholarship relating to all facets of music research.

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Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.

CSA was a division of Cambridge Information Group and provider of online databases, based in Bethesda, Maryland, before merging with ProQuest of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2007. CSA hosted databases of abstracts and developed taxonomic indexing of scholarly articles. These databases were hosted on the CSA Illumina platform and were available alongside add-on products like CSA Illustrata. The company produced numerous bibliographic databases in different fields of the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and technology. Thus, coverage included materials science, environmental sciences and pollution management, biological sciences, aquatic sciences and fisheries, biotechnology, engineering, computer science, sociology, linguistics, and other areas.

Inspec is a major indexing database of scientific and technical literature, published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and formerly by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), one of the IET's forerunners.

POPLINE was a reproductive health database, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and reproductive health issues. POPLINE was maintained by the K4Health Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, and it was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are about, to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, it is about identifying and describing the subject of documents. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels: terms in a document such as a book; objects in a collection such as a library; and documents within a field of knowledge.

A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.

Projekt Dyabola is a software for creating and browsing bibliographic data and image collections, specifically targeted to the humanities community. The program is built and maintained by the Biering & Brinkmann company of Germany, and access to a web version is available through subscription. The service is available in six languages.

CAB Direct is a source of references for the applied life sciences It incorporates two bibliographic databases: CAB Abstracts and Global Health. CAB Direct is an access point for multiple bibliographic databases produced by CABI. This database contains over 11 million bibliographic records, which includes 746,000 full text articles. It also includes noteworthy literature reviews. News articles and reports are also part of this combined database. CAB Direct has now migrated to CABI's new platform CABI Digital Library - the new home of CABI's research content. https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/

Academic Search is a monthly indexing service. It was first published in 1997 by EBSCO Publishing in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Its academic focus is international universities, covering social science, education, psychology, and other subjects. Publishing formats covered are academic journals, magazines, newspapers, and CD-ROM.

References

  1. Feather, John; Sturges, Paul, eds. (2003). International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science (Second ed.). London: Routledge. p.  127. ISBN   0-415-25901-0.
  2. Kusserow, Arne; Groppe, Sven (2014). "Getting Indexed by Bibliographic Databases in the Area of Computer Science". Open Journal of Web Technologies. 1 (2). doi:10.19210/OJWT_2014v1i2n02_Kusserow . Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  3. Reitz, Joan M. (2004). "bibliographic database". Dictionary for Library and Information Science. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited. p. 70. ISBN   1-59158-075-7.
  4. Price, Gary (15 May 2019). "Impactstory Announces Beta Release of "Get The Research" Search Engine". LJ infoDOCKET. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  5. "information processing". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2010. Retrieved April 29, 2010.
  6. Borgman, Christine L. (2007). Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet . Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp.  89–90. ISBN   978-0-262-02619-2.