A review of journal coverage overlap with an extension to the definition of overlap

Abstract

This investigation reviews the research into journal coverage overlap of the secondary literature indicating the uneven development in this research during the past 30 years and introduces a prototype extension to the traditional definition of overlap. The products of abstracting or indexing services are referred to as secondary sources. Journal coverage overlap (traditional overlap) has been classically defined as the ratio of the number of either journal titles or articles in the intersection of two secondary sources to the number in their union. The extension to the classical definition proposed begins with this traditional definition and proceeds to incorporate the relative sizes of the sources into a matrix of dissimilarity values. Matrices for both the traditional definition and its extension are computed for two universes of secondary source ensembles. These matrices are formed by comparing all possible unions of sources in a universe of secondary sources. Multidimensional scaling analysis is applied to graphically demonstrate this modified concept of coverage overlap and a naive secondary tool selection algorithm is presented. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Environmental Microbiology: A Database Coverage Study

“…Gluck (1990) includes a useful review of some of the earliest attempts at determining overlap of journals in abstracting and indexing sources.…”

“…Some of these studies searched a subject term to find the number of postings in different databases and did not exclude non-journal material. Useful summaries of previous database overlap studies can be found in Gluck (1990) and Hood and Wilson (2003 may not always cover all of the articles that might be of interest for some interdisciplinary subjects.…”

Overlap in bibliographic databases

“…The most comprehensive review of the literature and discussion of the overlap topic is found in the excellent article by Gluck (1990). Gluck provides 145 items in his bibliography; a discussion of the history of research in this area; main research problems tackled; and pressing research questions that need addressing.…”

Datenbankqualität im Kontext bibliothekarischer Dienstleistungen

“…Erstellung von Listen der wichtigsten Zeitschriften eines Fachgebiets und Prüfung, in welchem Umfang Artikel daraus in der Datenbank nachgewiesen sind ® Vergleich der in verschiedenen Datenbanken erhaltenen Trefferzahlen zu Testrecherchen; zusätzlich können die Treffer inhaltlich auf Relevanz geprüft und die Überlappung der Ergebnisse ermittelt werden ("Relativbeurteilung") [13], [38] Θ Ermittlung von aussagekräftigem Zahlenmaterial zum Aufbau der Datenbank hinsichtlich Anzahl der Nachweise, geographischer Abdeckung, erfasster Publikationsarten, -sprachen, -jähre [26], Jaguszewski und Kempf erstellten beispielsweise für die Fächer Chemie und Mathematik je eine repräsentative Liste von Zeitschriften, die sie als essentiell für die jeweiligen Fächer ansahen [39], Sie prüften dann bei verschiedenen Current Awareness Services, ob Inhaltsverzeichnisse der jeweiligen Zeitschriften dort im Datenbestand enthalten waren. Wie in Ta …”