Engl 600
Fall 2015
English Studies Databases: How They Rock, How They Wobble
The third in a series of traditional research assignments, this short review calls on you to reproduce and expand
some of the work you undertook in the library a couple of weeks ago, but in a slightly more systematic way. It’s
also intended as a first step, if you haven’t already taken it, towards assembling a working bibliography for your
ongoing project. (Or “project,” if it’s largely a notional one.)
Your Feasibility Study probably suggested any number of assumptions that need to be tested, facts that need to be
checked, articles that need to be gathered, sorted, and synthesized. At a minimum, then, you should now re-run your
initial search—honed or revised as appropriate—across several different databases, if you haven’t already. (It may
go without saying that you should keep a record of those searches, using Zotero to store and sort their results. I’ll
also just mention in passing that weeding, compiling, and evaluating the results of this expanded search will give
you the foundation of a working bibliography.) As you do so, you will not only evolve a better sense of the shape
and direction of your project, you will inevitably gain some familiarity with the ins and outs of all those databases.
The basics, then: after spending some time with several databases, pick one to evaluate, explaining how it rocks and
how it wobbles. (I cribbed that language from a piece by Rob Weir in the July 2010 issue of Inside Higher Ed.) In
other words: assess its strengths and weaknesses. With regard to what? Well, things like:
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design (the layout is impossibly cluttered? you can never find what you need without opening a thousand
pull-down menus? you have to scroll down two screens to discover crucial check-boxes?)
ease of use (you’ve got to be fluent in Boolean logic to construct a workable search? when you return to a
screen you were at two clicks ago, you have to re-enter your search terms all over again? you get carpal
tunnel syndrome, trying to refine or save your results? the “Help” feature is decidedly unhelpful?)
coverage (it doesn’t include all that many journals in your field? it leaves out one or two absolutely critical
titles? several important journals are only indexed back to 2002?)
Those bullets don’t exhaust the possibilities, of course. In general, you’ll want to discuss what’s enlightened, what’s
retrograde, what’s awkward, what’s elegant, what’s intuitive, what’s mystifying, what’s unique. If it helps to
contrast your chosen database against another one, go ahead. In any event, I’m counting on you to devise an
effective structure for your report. It may be purely expository prose (narration, description, evaluation), or it may
include bullet points, numbered lists, and tables.
Please choose from among the following databases:
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Academic Search Premier
ArticleFirst
ERIC
Humanities Full Text
JSTOR
MLA Bibliography
OmniFile FullText Mega
Oxford Journals
Project Muse
CompPile
Estimated length: 2-5 pages. Due: Wednesday, October 14.