The Beyond Citation project team is thrilled to announce the public launch of our website at BeyondCitation.org. Even though scholars use academic databases every day, it is difficult to find information about how the databases work and what is in them. Beyond Citation gathers information about academic databases in one place to enable traditional humanities scholars…
Over the last few weeks, the Beyond Citation team has transformed into a web production team of sorts, focused on making key decisions about site platform, site architecture, user interaction, design, and communication. Beyond Citation—a project to build a website that aggregates accessible, structured information about scholarly databases—has the potential to enhance how scholars approach,…
I teach workshops on library databases to a range of users at the New York Public Library. Some of the students are academics, others are unaffiliated scholars, and many more are undergraduate or graduate students from nearby schools. The degree to which they’re familiar with platforms, searching, Boolean logic, peer-review, and formats varies. But one…
Every year, more and more research is done by scholars online via academic databases. Print journals, scholarly monographs, newspapers, periodical indexes, and even ephemera and image collections are steadily transitioning from print to electronic. Historically, research using print collections took place in library reading rooms with material owned by the library. Increasingly, research using electronic…
Beyond Citation hopes to encourage critical thinking by scholars about academic databases. But what do we mean by critical thinking? Media culture scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has defined critique as not attacking what you think is false, but thinking through the limitations and possibilities of what you think is true. One question that the…
During the Fall 2013 semester, I started reading, thinking and writing about the impact of academic databases such as JSTOR and Gale’s Artemis: Primary Sources on research and scholarship. I learned that databases shape the questions that can be asked and the arguments that can be made by scholars through search interfaces, algorithms, and the items…