Bibliographic database

For computer programs to manage an individual's bibliographic references, see Reference management software

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.^[1]

A bibliographic database may cover a wide range of topics or one academic field like computer science.^[2] A significant number of bibliographic databases are marketed under a trade name by licensing agreement from vendors, or directly from their makers: the indexing and abstracting services.^[3]

Many bibliographic databases have evolved into digital libraries, providing the full text of the organised contents:^{[citation needed]}for instance CORE also organises and mirrors scholarly articles and OurResearch develops a search engine for open access content in Unpaywall.^[4] Others merge with non-bibliographic and scholarly databases to create more complete disciplinary search engine systems, such as Chemical Abstracts or Entrez.

History

Prior to the mid-20th century, individuals searching for published literature had to rely on printed bibliographic indexes, generated manually from index cards. "During the early 1960s computers were used to digitize text for the first time; the purpose was to reduce the cost and time required to publish two American abstracting journals, the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine and the Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By the late 1960s, such bodies of digitized alphanumeric information, known as bibliographic and numeric databases, constituted a new type of information resource.^[5] Online interactive retrieval became commercially viable in the early 1970s over private telecommunications networks. The first services offered a few databases of indexes and abstracts of scholarly literature. These databases contained bibliographic descriptions of journal articles that were searchable by keywords in author and title, and sometimes by journal name or subject heading. The user interfaces were crude, the access was expensive, and searching was done by librarians on behalf of 'end users'.^[6]

See also

• Citation index
• Document-oriented database
• Full-text database
• List of academic databases and search engines
• Institutional repository
• Online public access catalog (OPAC; library catalog)
• ISBNdb.com

References

1. Feather, John; Sturges, Paul, eds. (2003). International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science (Second ed.). London: Routledge. p. 127. ISBN 0-415-25901-0.
2. Kusserow, Arne; Groppe, Sven (2014). "Getting Indexed by Bibliographic Databases in the Area of Computer Science". Open Journal of Web Technologies. 1 (2). doi:10.19210/OJWT_2014v1i2n02_Kusserow. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
3. Reitz, Joan M. (2004). "bibliographic database". Dictionary for Library and Information Science. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited. p. 70. ISBN 1-59158-075-7.
4. Price, Gary (15 May 2019). "Impactstory Announces Beta Release of "Get The Research" Search Engine". LJ infoDOCKET. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
5. "information processing". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2010. Retrieved April 29, 2010.
6. Borgman, Christine L. (2007). Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 89–90. ISBN 978-0-262-02619-2.