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Comparing ComAbstracts with other databases Embedded within an elaborate system of supporting electronic databases and textual and research resources provided by the CIOS, the popular ComAbstracts and ComIndex (journals index) databases provide substantially better coverage of the communication field's literature than any other electronic database. When comparing CIOS databases to competing resources, we recommend consideration of some important issues. 1. Is your library concerned about issues of price inflation and the future of academic publishing?
1. Is your library concerned about issues of price inflation and the future of academic publishing? The CIOS is a not-for-profit scholarly organization originated and sustained within the communication field itself. It has offered innovative services, continually improved and expanded, since 1986. During this entire period of time, the CIOS has increased subscription costs an accumulated total of 5 percent. In other words, adjusting for inflation rates, the CIOS has a long tradition of offering progressively increasing levels of service, innovation and value at progressively decreasing cost. At the same time every academic librarian knows that university library budgets are being strangulated by spiraling increases in subscription costs from the for-profit publishing sector. While the CIOS has added significant full text resources to our services, advanced interface technologies (such as the visual communication concept explorer), and has rolled out free services for users from economically disadvantaged countries, our for-profit competitors have typically raised prices 4 to 10 percent per year (even in years that the consumer price index has increased only 1 percent) and have no claim whatever to contributing to the history of innovation. The business plan of the for-profit publishing sector is transparent -- (1) charge as much as possible for as little as possible (often by strategically leveraging monopoly control of particular academic content), (2) invest virtually nothing in research and development, (3) let students and scholars in disadvantaged areas of the world find a way to pay for access or go without. A corporate takeover of not-for-profit society publishing in the communication field is now being aggressively attempted. Publishers and large aggregators are attempting to establish monopoly control to access of communication scholarship. Prices for access are going up. Librarians can play an active role in protecting their own future and the values of the academy by subscribing to the CIOS's competent, comprehensive, and innovative not-for-profit databases.
2. Are the claims for coverage by for-profit vendors accurate? Other database vendors claim to cover some of the titles included in CIOS databases. We recommend that these claims be viewed with skepticism before deciding to subscribe to a competitor's database or deciding that an alternative database to which you already subscribe provides equivalent coverage to CIOS databases. We caution not to rely on Ulrichs listings, superficial coverage lists from a vendor's web site, or vendor advertising. A close look at the web version of one eminent social science/humanities database reveals that the vendor's claims (on the web and in Ulrichs) to coverage of communication titles is misleading. Although the vendor's advertising claimed coverage of 30 of the titles in ComAbstracts (and Ulrichs lists this coverage), in fact, the vendor only commits to regular coverage of 2 ComAbstracts titles. This remarkable disparity is not apparent unless one contacts the vendor directly and presses hard for information about "core" coverage. Or take the case of a publisher of a linguistics database whose advertising in early 2000 claimed that the database covered 300 journals back to 1985, in all more than 15,000 abstracts. Since conservatively the average academic journal publishes 15 articles per year, each year of coverage for a database of 300 journals should yield approximately 4,500 article abstracts. Accumulating 4,500 abstracts per year for 15 years should yield more than 67,000 article abstracts. The linguistics abstracts database only has abstracts for 15,000 articles -- what happened to the other 52,000 articles? Even allowing that some proportion of the 300 journals "covered" have not been in publication as long as 15 years, claims such as these are misleading and potentially dangerous to scholars who need to know that they've searched a particular set of periodicals exhaustively. In 2004, a competing for-profit communication-related database claimed coverage of 160 titles back to 1977, providing 35,000 records. A database with comprehensive coverage of 160 titles over 27 years should contain 50,000-80,000 records. With apologies to Pete Seeger, "Where have all the records gone?" In these and other cases, a vendor's claim to coverage is based on occasional inclusion of articles, or selective inclusion. Of course this is quite different from the claim to comprehensive coverage made by the CIOS. When making comparisons across databases, insist on seeing the list of titles that are covered comprehensively, cover to cover, every issue. You will be surprised at how often this list differs radically from the scope of coverage implied in the for-profit vendor's advertising.
3. Does coverage by for-profit vendors accurately reflect the boundaries of the communication field, or is the for-profit database a dump of at-hand content? One for-profit vendor is currently marketing agressively a database that ostensibly covers the communication field but strangely includes journals without any connection to the communication field as practioners understand it. The database includes a curious little smattering of titles from the field of social work including "Administration in Social Work" and "Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal". From engineering it includes "Space Communications" (where articles address issues in ploting and maintaining the orbits of space craft) and "Applied Acoustics". These journals have no content relevant to communication studies as the field of communication studies understands its own boundaries. From education, a field with hundreds of its own journals, the database includes "Adult Learning" and "Cambridge Journal of Education". One might wonder why these from hundreds of possible education journals? The apparent answer is simply that they were at hand and have been dumped into the mix in a cynical attempt to impress acquisitions librarians not well informed about the field of communication/journalism. From sociology, a field students of communication recognizes as a distinct discipline with scores of its own journals, the for-profit vendor oddly includes "British Journal of Sociology", "Sociology", "Youth and Society". From linguistics, a field quite distinct from communication/journalism, the database includes "Journal of Greek Linguistics", "Journal of Pidgen and Creole Languages", and "Scottish Language". Inclusion of this and other opportunistic content represents a substantial disservice to the communication field whose work is buried along with unrelated content from other fields. In a database with content that exceeds the boundaries of the communication field the real conceptual interests and research programs of the communication field are blurred and indistinct and it is difficult to track the productivity of the field or the work of particular scholars.
4. What are the capabilities of the for-profit database vendor's search engine? The full text of the ComAbstracts database can be searched; that is, abstracts may be searched by word, phrase, or author. The CIOS search engine supports full Boolean search logic (AND, OR, NOT, XOR), proximity searching, wildcard searching, and word conflation (which finds alternative forms of words based on common linguistic roots). How does the competing vendor's engine compare? Are all these features supported? In the CIOS's ComAbstracts database synonyms have been prepared for many clusters of terms and are included automatically in searches unless this feature is explicitly overridden in the search specification (for example, a search for 'YOUTH' will also match 'TEEN' and 'ADOLESCENT'). The database may also be searched using a keyword system consisting of menus of prepared subject terms and search specifications. Does the competing vendor provide synonym sets? Does the competing vendor provide keywords? Does the competing vendor provide menus of prepared search terms to assist novice searchers?
5. Does the for-profit vendor mark records with both keywords and metaterms from a controlled vocabulary? ComAbstracts records are tagged with two levels of metadata based on a controlled vocabulary derived from statistical studies of language use in the communication field. No other vendor has developed a controlled vocabulary specific to the discipline. The first level of metadata is termed "keywords" and the second is termed "metaterms". This uniquely superior level of record markup permits ComAbstracts to be used efficiently to answer abstract questions -- for example, to find all relevant literature treating public address by heads of state in European countries, just search for Europe, public address, and presidential figures -- three ComAbstracts metaterm categories. It is not possible to conduct such a search with acceptable efficiency in competing databases, which would require the user to input each name of a European country (Spain, Italy, Denmark, Germany, Austia, etc.) and repeat the search, and then repeat it again for every head of state of a European country (e.g. Churchill, Hitler, Thatcher, Petain, De Nicola, Blair, Adenauer, DeGaul, Franco, etc.).
6. Is the for-profit vendor adding older as well as newer records? In areas such as medicine and the physical sciences the scholarly article has a short life span and currency in the database should be given high priority in evaluating a vendor's product. The situation is different in the communication field. Here the term of relevance of a scholarly article is far longer and newer articles do not tend to render older articles irrelevant. In consequence, depth and breadth of coverage are at least equally important considerations in evaluating a database covering the communication field. The ComAbstracts database grows with both newer and older records throughout the year. It now has bibliographic records extending to 1915. What is the competing vendor's track record for expansion in breadth? Is the vendor adding older records? How far back does comprehensive coverage extend?
7. Is the for-profit vendor adding book records as well as journal records? The ComAbstracts database contains abstracts for important books in communication-related areas as well as journal article information.
8. Does the for-profit service contain next generation tools and features explicitly designed to guide communication/journalism undergraduates to form questions wisely in their course-related searches? Many librarians are concerned that student use of large research databases leaves students adrift in a sea of information without guidance to help them formulate productive questions and target sucessful searches. The ComAbstracts database contains unique automated guides for students in standard communication and journalism courses to help them to identify key concepts in work related to their courses and to formulate effective searches. This kind of build-in expertese is not available in other databases and is a unique value of a database designed by academics as a service to their field rather than by non-academics as a way of making large corporate profits.
9. Does the for-profit service contain online reference guides to citation style and basic information about understanding and avoiding plagiarism? The ComAbstracts database provides search guides designed to alert students to issues in recognizing and avoiding plagiarism and reference guides for citing academic works in research papers in either MLA or APA style.
10. Are there any hidden costs in the for-profit vendor's subscription? For example, to get electronic access are you also required to subscribe to a print version of the product at extra cost? Is the print product providing value beyond the electronic database?
11. Does the for-profit vendor's database suffer from the "Yahoo Syndrome"? A search in an eclectic database, such as Yahoo, too frequently produces a huge collection of records from a disparate array of obscure sources. For example a recent web page search of Yahoo for "television violence" yielded over 56,000 hits. Somewhere in that search result may be resources of disciplinary relevance to the communication field but only the most tenacious searcher would put forth the effort required to locate them. Similarly, why deploy a database built for psychologists or sociologists in support of education and scholarship in the communication field? CIOS services focus on the communication field exclusively. Hence, every item in a search result has relevance to the field and every detail in CIOS services has been designed with the specific needs, traditions, sensibilities, concepts, and language of the communication field firmly in focus. Beware as well of database vendors who throw together aspects of the communications industry's publications with publications of strictly academic focus. This is done in an effort to impress acquisitions librarians with the database's very broad scope of coverage in "communications". However, this is rather like combining cooking magazines together with scientific journals in a database meant for use in agricultural science. The more vendors stray outside the commonly understood boundaries of the communication field, the more dross is included in search results. The best database is one that targets a discipline's scholarly texts without straying beyond the boundaries of the field. In result of this strict disciplinary focus, the CIOS has been able to provide innovative and advanced search interfaces that cannot be sensible deployed in eclectic databases. The CIOS's unique "Visual Communication Concept Explorer", for example, leverages knowledge garnered from statistical studies of the communication field's literature to help students and scholars find relevant search terms.
More Information As a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting electronic resources for communication scholarship and education, CIOS databases and services are an unmatched value. Please contact the CIOS at for more information or, if you're a library representative, to set up trial access for your institution.
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