The Communication Studies Researcher and the Communication Studies Indexes

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The existence of widely available large, multi-subject, online databases calls into question the necessity for small, disciplinespecific indexes to support research. This study attempts to determine whether the online Communication Studies indexes provide access to the journal literature that researchers in the field actually cite and whether, where the current journal literature is concerned, that access is in any way superior to that provided by large, multi-subject, online indexes.

EBSCO'sCommunication & Mass Media Complete: An Appreciable Improvement Over Previous Communication Studies Indexing?

“…The field of communication studies has become too large and too varied in its interests and scope to be wedged into its own little index. : Tyler, Boudreau, and Leach (2005).…”

Use of the Checklist Method for Content Evaluation of Full-text Databases

“…51 Schaffer discovered that "less than one-third" of the cited articles in his study were available in full text in at least one of the twentysix online databases licensed by Texas A&M. 52 Finally, because this investigation is based on checking the entire universe of periodical citations in LRTS and Collection Building during 2004 rather than random samples, the use of statistical significance tests would be inappropriate. Table 7 analyzes the results by publication date.…”

“…Tyler, Boudreau, and Leach selected 6,170 citations from the first available 2000 issue of an unnamed number of core communication studies journals and checked them for coverage in three communication studies indexes and five multidisciplinary databases. 44 Schaffer used a sample of 368 citations from more than 150 articles published by psychology department faculty at Texas A & M University between 2000 and 2002 as a checklist (although that term is not used by Schaffer) for evaluating the content of twenty-six electronic full-text databases licensed by the library. 45 …”

Search tools and scholarly citation practices in literary studies

“…Some have also evaluated web-scale discovery against subject databases in the context of finding information in a particular discipline, often asking if the specificity of a subject database offered advantages over multi-subject databases or web-scale discovery. In terms of coverage of relevant literature, several studies have found that Google Scholar exceeds the standard subject databases in fields such as communication (Tyler et al, 2005(Tyler et al, , 2008, geography (S ¸tirbu et al, 2015), and history (Pearce, 2019), whereas subject databases had superior coverage for archaeology (Tyler et al, 2009). Many of these studies assume a correlation between extent of coverage and usefulness, whereas others appreciate that certain search features might make the subject databases preferable in chemistry (Levine-Clark and Kraus, 2007), health sciences (Bramer et al, 2013), social sciences (Dahlen and Hanson, 2017), or specific purposes such as systematic reviews (Bates et al, 2017;Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020).…”