The Quick and the Dirty: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Database Overlap at the Journal Title Level

• Published in: The Serials librarian 2015-05, Vol.68 (1-4), p.249-254
• Main Authors: Harker, Karen R., Kizhakkethil, Priya
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Budgets; Expectations; Library collections
• ISSN: 0361-526X; 1541-1095
• DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2015.1016858

With the growing predominance of full-text databases, publisher's searchable websites, Discovery systems, and Google, abstract and index (A&I) databases are becoming less prominent in the academic library's collection. The A&I databases enable the serious researcher to more carefully refine their search, but given the users' growing expectations of ease and "good enough," this may be a need that is of less importance today. For this reason and given the decreasing budgets for collections, librarians are looking at these resources with a more skeptical eye. In addition to traditional evaluation measures, such as costs, usage, and faculty input, we looked at the overlap of indexing coverage. Those who have conducted such overlap studies have approached them at either the journal or article level. Article-level overlap studies demonstrate coverage of selected articles in the databases under study. Conversely, journal-level studies examine the extent of indexing of journals among the selected databases. Both methods are time-consuming and require extensive resources. A simplification of the journal-level method is to compare lists of journals indexed.