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RESEARCH STRATEGIES - WILLIAM BADKE, COPYRIGHT 2008   

Note that chapter order in the print edition will differ from the above.  The online version will retain the
former chapter divisions.

[The material below is now is the second part of Chapter 5 of the print edition. It has been
condensed for the online version, and several sections have been omitted].

Just when you thought that finding books was trouble enough, someone is sure to suggest to you
that there’s another whole world of research materials crying out for attention—journals. Actually,
the whole category I’m thinking of is broader than that. Librarians, ever the stuffy folks we are, call
them “periodicals,” that is, materials that arrive in the library periodically, as opposed to a book that
arrives only once. Included in the category is everything from newspapers to popular magazines
(or e-zines) to scholarly journals. But I’m going to call them journals anyway, because the primary
readers of this book are doing academic research that focuses on journals.

Before we get to journal databases, let’s clarify what makes journals different from books. The most
significant difference is that you can’t catalog a journal like you catalog a book. When a librarian gets
a new book for the collection, the book is cataloged (i.e. has a catalog record created for it) and put
on the shelf. After that, there is nothing to do but sign the book out and check it back in until it falls
apart. The cataloger’s job is done.

But journal issues keep on arriving every week or month or quarter or year. By definition, they are
periodical. You can’t just create a descriptive record for them once and for all like you can a book,
because they keep changing as more issues are added to the growing collection. While it might be possible
for a librarian to assign a subject heading to each article in each journal as it arrives and then to create a database so that you could find articles on any given topic, it just wouldn’t be practical. No librarian has the time to create a separate database of all the library’s journal articles.

The field of journals is governed by several categories, some of which are showing rapid change:

Even thinking of using journals in a research project may produce in you a shudder of horror. You imagine
sitting down in front of piles of printed journals, thumbing through each one in an anguished quest for something (anything!) on the “The Implications for Generation Y of Max Weber’s Approach to the Sociology
of Cities.” Hours later, in bitterness of heart and soul, you will emerge, red-eyed, with one article that is
only vaguely relevant. Journal research used to be done that way when your grandfather was a wee lad in school. Now things are very different, due to the development of journal databases.

These databases are created this way: Indexers sit down in front of piles of print journals or their
electronic equivalents (often related to a specific subject discipline, such as psychology or history or
religion) and create a metadata record for each article. The metadata is loaded into the database, thus
making it searchable. By doing a search, you can generate a list of articles from various journals that are relevant to the subject you are studying.

Approaching a journal database means first being able to “read” its interface. The interface is what you
actually see on the computer screen when you search for the data in a journal database. It includes the
screen display, search methods, and so on. Interfaces change constantly. Data doesn’t. What this means
is that the screen may look different the next time you use the database. The instructions on use may be different. Even the methods you need to follow to search the index may be different. The data inside the database is the same, but the means you use to extract it may be brand new.

• Go over any instructions on the screen.

• Start with a keyword search and identify 2 or 3 results that look like they are relevant to your
  research question/thesis.

• Click on the titles of these relevant articles, one by one, to open the full records.

• Are there suggested subject heading links beside or above the list ofresults? Are they hyperlinked?

• Look for a “Thesaurus,” “Subjects,” “Browse Subjects,” or “Indexes” link.

• If you are going to search by keywords, what sorts of Boolean operators are in use in this database?
  Is phrase searching allowed?

• Try a search on a broad basis first, perhaps inputting a subject heading or only one keyword. If
  you get more than about 500 “hits” (citations to individual articles), look for a means to refine or
  narrow your search by adding more words.

Here is an interface from Academic Search Premier, an EBSCO journal database:
 

A journal article citation is simply a description of an article with sufficient information to help you
find it. While the format of a citation may vary, this is the information usually provided:

Badke, William. “Can’t Get No Respect: Helping Faculty to Understand the Educational Power
of Information Literacy.” The Reference Librarian 43, no. 89/90 (2005): 63-80.

Here it is broken down:

Rather than simply listing citations to various journal articles, full text databases add the actual text
of the articles in electronic form—usually as HTML or PDF or both, the former looking like a re-typed
document, and the latter looking like a photocopy of the original print version. Increasingly, journal
databases are going to PDF only.

You send in a request, and the database tells you what it found (or didn’t find). The database search
program will rarely tell you what you did wrong.

Be prepared to go back and figure out what you did wrong or how you could get better results.

Varieties of the Journal Database [see print edition]

Federated Search [see print edition]