title or browse for publications by geographical region or country.
The range of periodicals listed is impressive. It includes numerous foreign magazines as well as the typical Western newsstand titles.
Primedia Business Magazines
http://industryclick.com/icmagazines.asp
Primedia is a publisher of trade magazines as well as a provider of other business services. Its site provides searchable access to selected content from approximately 100 of the company’s publi- cations. The site also links to publications so the user is only one click away from the magazine’s own site.
Locating Additional Aggregators, Portals, and Individual Magazines
Use these directory pages to find more free periodical content:
http://directory.google.com/Top/News/Magazines_ and_
E-zines/Directories Open Directory Project
http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=magazines
with a steady and reliable stream of content. The company pur- chased UnCover (a freely accessible bibliographic database with pay-per-view features that was a favorite with librarians) in 2000.
Ingenta picked up Catchword, a British document delivery com- petitor, in 2001. The current service is an amalgamation of these content-rich entities. Although Ingenta is in the business of mar- keting full-text to libraries and other institutions, anyone may search it for free and locate bibliographic information from thou- sands of periodicals. If your search succeeds and you locate resources, Ingenta will display a summary and a citation (with enough information to facilitate acquiring the resource from a library or other information outlet).
But providing article information is what the Reader’s Guide does isn’t it? Yes, but not for free. And the Reader’s Guidecovers over 300 publications, which librarians help choose for indexing.
True, but Ingenta, a healthy service in terms of longevity and pub- lisher relationships, covers about 30,000. But the latter list does not entirely overlap with the Reader’s Guide. The question is how well does the freely accessible Ingenta publication list stack up to the librarian-accepted Reader’s Guidelist of publications indexed?
Ingenta covers 242 of the publications (i.e., 80 percent) indexed by theReader’s Guidelist. Furthermore, of two other heavily used H.W. Wilson sources, theSocial Sciences Indexand the Humanities Index, Ingenta also overlaps significantly. These three highly regarded Wilson indexes cover approximately 1,344 periodicals.
Ingenta allows searches of author, article title, keyword, journal title, and International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) for the majority of them. No charge. Of course, if you like what you find, Ingenta can almost always fax, e-mail, or deliver the material online for a fee.
During this comparison of Ingenta and these Wilson indexes, it became apparent that even though Ingenta didn’t duplicate the legacy indexes under discussion, it indexed so many publications that, indeed, it probably overlapped significantly with other
Wilson titles. For example, Ingenta’s coverage of the IEEE was extensive. Similarly, its coverage of scientific, medical, financial, and education topics is excellent. Searching Ingenta in lieu of buy- ing indexes or compact discs that merely include citations and abstracts, therefore, saves not only the amount spent on just a few Wilson products, but many of them. Using Ingenta, the general public index user will locate articles in AARP Modern Maturity, American Heritage, Car and Driver, Commonweal, Ebony, Ladies’
Home Journal, and information from the Canadian Journal of Physics, Circuit World, and the ABA Banking Journal.
Ingenta does not employ the most user-friendly search interface, so the best strategy is to proceed directly to the advanced search interface and, if comprehensiveness is a factor, be sure to perform your search over the maximum number of years. The default search is 1997 to the present, but I have always selected 1988 to the present.
You should also be aware that there are actually two Ingenta period- ical databases. One is called “Online Articles” and offers over 5,000 full-text publications for immediate online delivery. An even larger database is called “Fax/Ariel Articles” (sometimes Ingenta also calls this file “Uncover Plus”) and covers more than 26,000 publications.
There is overlap, but you need to perform your search twice to get a true picture of the literature on your subject. (Hopefully, Ingenta site developers will merge these two files to facilitate searching.) This is a simple matter; selecting an alternate tab at the top of your retrieval page will automatically rerun your search in the other database (Figure 1.3).
In Figure 1.3, the searcher seeks articles about “aboriginal art.”
Note that the searcher is not interested in book reviews. The search locates 60 items meeting the search criteria. Also note that the search was run in the Fax/Ariel database, but can be rerun in the Online Articles database for possible additional retrieval. Additional options include viewing a summary of the article and its terms of availability.
The searcher can purchase the article or pursue a number of other
ways to obtain it without charge, including an affiliated library or interlibrary loan. The bibliographic information, shown in Figure 1.4, is sufficient for these two latter options.
Because Ingenta covers so many publications, you can expect to find information of interest on almost any subject. (For example, an Ingenta keyword search on “Lakers” locates articles in Sports Illustrated, TV Guide, Newsweek, Sport, and People Weekly.)