Content databases FEATURE
and secured; and the ScienceDirect Article Recommender, delivering more relevant reading recommendations based on the researcher’s online search behaviour. Haak continues: ‘The suite will also offer advantages to academic community members beyond researchers. Research managers will have more tools to aid them in advancing the strategic objectives of their institutions, such as tracking and improving their rank and reputation, identifying funding opportunities and attracting world-class talent. Similarly, it will support librarians as they add services to support researchers’ data management needs, and as they implement research and institutional repositories.
‘So what we’re basically doing is combining our reputable networks with world-leading content and data that, powered with technology, harnesses behavioural and network “signals” to generate a more intelligent user experience across our products. This empowers the academic research community to turn information into knowledge more efficiently, helping them make a difference.’
The role of database providers Explaining the important role that database providers play in providing a high-quality service, James Phimister, vice president of strategy at ProQuest says: ‘Content databases form repositories of information that are invaluable to researchers and research libraries alike. When serving the need of researchers, a well-curated database ensures a level of comprehensiveness, while also screening and filtering out less pertinent content.
‘As such, content databases inherently accelerate a researcher’s workflow, eliminating the need to search across multiple destinations, or waste time on content that has not been reviewed or appropriately vetted. ‘For the research library,’ Phimister continues, ‘content databases are valuable for the breadth of patron needs that are served. For the aspiring but inexperienced researcher, aggregated content databases provide a natural
Content databases inherently accelerate a researcher’s workflow
starting point for enquiry. For example, ProQuest Central brings more than 20,000 periodical titles, in addition to news sources, dissertations, video and more spanning 160 subject areas. Users can begin their enquiry across this vast and diverse content set, while successively narrowing search results with facets and search tools.
‘In a parallel vein, research libraries also value content databases for their specific focus. ProQuest has hundreds of databases that, while not all having broad interdisciplinary appeal, are essential resources for research, teaching and libraries. For example, researchers of American civil rights history, often find ProQuest’s Historical Black Newspapers, and ProQuest’s History Vault Civil Rights Collections to be essential resources. These collections cover not only well-known events, but also unheralded events nested deeply in association records and government
documents. By bringing diverse content into one environment, new hypotheses and insights can be formed.
Recent database trends Highlighting some of the recent database trends, Ross MacIntyre, head of library analytics at Jisc, observes: ‘No-one would deny the importance of keeping a watchful eye on emerging trends in research databases, but it would be senseless simply to future-gaze and neglect tried-and-tested solutions that have long proven themselves to be the bedrock of resource discovery.’ Talking about Jisc’s Zetoc monitoring and search service for global research publications, MacIntyre added: ‘The Zetoc service has been supporting the research community in current awareness of quality-assured, comprehensive journal papers for 15 years, and is widely recognised as one of the world’s most comprehensive research databases. ‘With more than 1,000 new papers being published daily, keeping on top can seem like an unmanageable task. Zetoc’s continued popularity is due to researchers being able to personalise alerts that are relevant to their interests straight to their inbox, helping them keep abreast of the latest papers, as and when they come available, without spending lots of time and effort having to search manually themselves.’
Unsurprisingly this function was the most valued Zetoc service, cited by more than half of respondents in our latest survey. MacIntyre adds: ‘While the highly-valued core service remains much the same as always,
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DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016 Research Information 27
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