wiser: humanities arts & humanities citation index isabel d. holowaty, history librarian...

WISER: HumanitiesArts & Humanities Citation Index

Isabel D. Holowaty, History LibrarianElizabeth Mitchell, HFL Graduate Trainee 2007-8

Aim

• What is it• How does it work• Features & Pitfalls• Demonstrations• Hands-on• Questions

What is the AHCI

• Part of Web of Science (AHCI, SSCI, SCI)• Multidisciplinary citation indexes covering the journal literature of all disciplines

• Web of Knowledge: Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports, Highly Cited, etc.

What is the AHCI

• Fully covers 1,144+ scholarly journals• Provides access to publications from 1975 forward• Averages 2,300 new records per week• Contains a current total of 2.5+ million records • Contains unique implicit citations that refer you to actual representations of a book, a work of art, a music score, or anything else. • As of January 2000, the Arts & Humanities Index contains searchable, full-length, English-language author abstracts.

AHCI subject coverage

Archaeology Architecture

Art Literary Reviews

Linguistics Literature

Theatre Poetry

Language Radio, Television & Film

Classics Philosophy

History Religion

Music Dance

Asian Studies Folklore

Searching options

For reference to journal article, book review (General Search)

For reference to a cited work (Cited Ref search)

General search

Author?

Title?

Subject?

Locate Full-text

Research before the article

Research after the article

Cited Reference search

Cited by whom?

Features 1

• All content of a journal is indexed, not just articles

• Citation searches & analysis: Highly cited

• Author affiliation searches

• Find illustrations of artistic or musical works

• Refine by subject, source, document types, authors, etc.

• Combination searches

• Search history

Features 2

• Cross-searching with other disciplines:

> Social Sciences, Sciences

• Exporting, saving, printing

• Alerts

• Save and re-run searches

Pitfalls

• Foreign language titles are translated!

• Search compound names in two ways:

van gogh v* or vangogh v*

• Cited works are heavily abbreviated, inconsistently

referenced and frequently wrong

• No abstracts for pre-2000 entries in AHCI

• Subject searching is difficult

Questions?

Demonstration

Hands-on