Staying-up-to-date with the Library - Penn Printout, Sept 1993

The University of Pennsylvania's Online Computing Magazine

September 1993 - Volume 10:1

Current Contents: Staying up-to-date
with the Library's newest database

By Bob Walther

Current awareness" resources, long familiar tools in the physical and applied sciences, are now becoming increasingly available to scholars in all disciplines. Researchers have traditionally used these easy-to-scan printed compilations to stay on top of rapidly changing research fronts by continuously monitoring new publications. One such resource is a publication by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) called Current Contents. This weekly magazine reproduces the tables of contents of research journals and is published in seven different "editions": Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Science; Arts & Humanities; Clinical Medicine; Engineering, Technology & Applied Sciences; Life Sciences; Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences; Social and Behavioral Sciences. The idea is to allow researchers and scholars to browse through the latest tables of contents of the significant journals in their field to find those articles relevant to their own work.

This concept has now been translated into an online database with some major enhancements over its print counterpart. In June the Penn Library brought online not one but two Current Contents files, both linked to Franklin, the Library's computerized catalog. One of these files, Current Contents: Table of Contents, (with the PennData label CTOC) is very similar to the printed version-a file containing the table of contents for each issue of a journal. The companion file, called Current Contents: Articles (or CART), is an index (with authors' abstracts when available) to the individual articles in the same journals. Both files are updated weekly and cover more than 6,500 English and foreign-language journals in all academic fields. The journals chosen for inclusion in Current Contents have been selected by ISI through citation studies-these are the journals most often cited by researchers and scholars.

The CTOC file of tables of contents

A search by journal title (t= ) in CTOC will display a list of records, each containing the entire table of contents for one issue of the journal. Each journal is also assigned to at least one "Journal Category" by ISI. This allows users to do a keyword search (k= ) using these categories to retrieve records not just for a single journal but for a broad subject area. There are 225 journal categories in Current Contents ranging from classics and dance to computer science and clinical neurology. You can access the entire list of categories online in CTOC by using the explain keyword screens (exp=k).

The CART file of article citations

The search capabilities of the CART file go far beyond anything possible in the printed editions of Current Contents. Citations to journal articles can be retrieved by author (a= ) or keyword (k= ) searches and limited, for example, by journal category or subfile (each of the subfiles corresponds to one of the eight printed Current Contents "editions"). Approximately 70 percent of the records in CART also have author-supplied abstracts. For journals in the sciences and social sciences, ISI adds the abstracts that have been published with the article. These abstracts make the article more retrievable; help the researcher establish the potential usefulness of the article; and, in some cases, may themselves supply all the information the researcher needs. Author-supplied descriptors are also included when available for an article in the sciences or social sciences. However, in most cases they are not available, so ISI also uses a computer algorithm to derive descriptor terms from the most frequently occurring words and phrases in the titles of the papers cited by authors. Since these are generated independently of the article titles or abstracts, they improve the retrieval power of the database.

As its name suggests, currency is one of the most important features of CC. ISI claims a three to ten day processing time for all the journals it covers. The Library's CART and CTOC files are updated weekly. To give some examples of the timeliness this schedule produces, the July 2 file update covered the New York Review of Books dated June 24, and the July 9 update had the June 24 issue of Nature. This focus on turn-around time does come at a price, however. The subject indexing is minimal (and computer-generated), and authors have no first names, only initials. Both CART and CTOC will be rolling files; that is, old data will be dropped to make room for newer data. The files currently extend coverage back to October 1992. The plan is to allow the files to grow so that the Library has at least one year's backfile at all times.

CC and the humanities

Although much more familiar to people in sci-tech fields, the Current Contents files have much to offer humanists. The extensive coverage of foreign-language journals is especially useful in history, philosophy, literature, classics, and religion. Reflecting the continued importance of book publishing for scholarship in the humanities, about half of the arts and humanities subfile of CART consists of journal citations to book reviews. It also has large numbers of other reviews: film, theater, music, art, etc. It is important to note that ISI has made the decision to translate into English all journal article titles and to invert personal names (thus one searches for "joyce james" or "joyce j" rather than "james joyce").

Finding authors

For many researchers, authors and not subjects will be their primary route into Current Contents. To facilitate author searching, the Library has retained in CART the familiar a= search command from the Franklin system. The new twist with CART is that only last names and first (or first and second) initials are used for authors. The remarkable currency of the file allows a researcher to keep an eye on the most recent publications of colleagues. Also useful is the author's institutional address, which is entered into the citation when given in the journal article. This address information is searchable with the keyword (k= ) search command and can be useful for quickly locating research done at a particular facility. Abbreviations are often used with these addresses so some experimenting should be done to determine the best search strategy (University of Pennsylvania, for example, usually appears as "Univ Penn").

Finding out more

Obviously for a database of this breadth and versatility, an overview can only skim the surface of its features and possible uses. Readers can learn more by consulting the Current Contents Quick Guide available at Library service desks, by attending one of the Library instructional sessions, or simply by asking a librarian for more information.

BOB WALTHER is Online Services Coordinator in the Reference Department of Van Pelt Library

Sidebar: Current Contents at a glance

Database           Label   Contents


Current Contents   CART    Article citations with  
articles                   abstracts (when available)  
                           from 6500 journals-from Oct'92  
                           until a few weeks ago

Current Contents   CTOC    Tables of contents from 6500 
T of C                     journals

============================================================

Searching CART


Type k=            To search using a significant
                   word in any field of thecitation 
                   (example:  k=homophobia and aids)

Type a=            To search by author's last name
                   and first initial
                   (example: a=eagleton t)


Searching CTOC


Type t=             To search using the title of the 
                   journal (example: t=journal of 
                   organic chemistry)
  
Type k=             To search using ISI's journal 
                   categories or words in journal
                   titles (example: k=womens studies 
                   (Note: no apostrophe))