Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

January 2007

Title: Blackwell-Synergy
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
URL: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com
Cost: see in the review
Tested: January 12-13, 2007

The Context

Blackwell has been in the news quite prominently in recent weeks. The greatest news was its acquisition by John Wiley and Sons. From my digital perspective, it is not good news, as Wiley is quite behind in its digitization project even for contemporary (less than 10 years old) volumes of some periodicals, and its search software is not state of the art. As an example for the former, look at the coverage of one of the most important serial in library and information science and technology field. The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, is available (as of January, 2007) only for the years 2003, 2004 and 2005 (volumes 37, 38 and 39) with a total of 60 records. The ASIS&T Special collection covers one more year, 2002. Volume 40 of ARIST was released in 2005 November The Bulletin, and the Proceedings of the association don't fare much better in terms of digital availability, either.

As an example for the software deficiencies of the Wiley digital collections, it lumps together the Full-Text and Abstract index, which makes it impossible to search for articles with the query term in the abstract to focus the search. Obviously, if the term "relevance ranking" appears in the abstract its weight is much more than if it just occurs somewhere in the full text. The designers may not have taken a LIS 101 course or followed common sense when combining the full text and abstracts index.

I hope that in spite of the acquisition, Blackwell will keep its own digital identity and collection separate. This was not the case when Springer acquired Kluwer, but in that case it was for the better as Kluwer's implementation of the Verity software for its digital journal collection was very poor, as I reported in Online magazine.

Another news item on January 9 through Gary Price's informative and spiffy Resourceshelf reported that a Norwegian consortium of university libraries did not renew its contract for Blackwell-Synergy after unsuccessful negotiation about the price and conditions of use. Lastly, was the announcement of the redesign of Blackwell-Synergy on January 12. (There is yet another, I will mention at the end).

Of course, redesigns are nothing new, Springer got a substantial facelift a few months ago, Elsevier's has redesigned its ScienceDirect collection, but along with the news about the acquisitions by Wiley, it is a good opportunity to draw the attention to the significant digital collection of Blackwell.

The Content

There are articles from nearly 900 journals. The PR materials refer to 850 journals but they may have been written before Blackwell added 49 journals to the collection from 2007 onward. This set is less than half what Elsevier offers, about 40% smaller than the source base of Springer, but more than 60% larger than the journal base of John Wiley. It is interesting that Wiley bought Blackwell rather than the other way around.

Beyond the smaller journal collection, Wiley seems to have less influential journals. As a starter, only 189 (less than 40% of its journals) are covered by the most current edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of ISI. The JCR covers more than 50% of Blackwell's journals.

Even more interestingly, the average Journal Impact factor of Blackwell's science journals is considerably higher at 1.92, than the 1.6 JIF of Wiley's science journals. This may have to do also with the disciplinary composition differences between the Blackwell and Wiley journal stables covered in JCR. Because of the very different citation behaviors and patterns in the different disciplines, one should avoid comparing the impact factor of, say, biomedical journals versus metallurgy journals, the average of the aggregates of journal impact factors by these two publishers still can give some indication for the scholarly influence of the subsets of their journal collection which are monitored by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Blackwell's collection just passed the 1 million mark in the first days of 2007. For comparison, the largest STM publisher, Elsevier, has 8 million articles from about 1,700 journals, Springer (including the former Kluwer titles), has 3 million articles from about 1,400 journals. Wiley, has fewer journals (about 500) than Blackwell, but a larger online article count of about 1,6 million items, partly because of the preponderance of more productive science journals, and to some of its journals' substantial backfiles (certainly not the ones I mentioned earlier). Blackwell also started to create such backfiles half a year ago, and expects the completion of the retrospective digitization by 2008. There are already journals with pre-1996 articles. In my tests I could find for example, nearly 100,000 hits for articles from 1990-1995.

Although more than 60% of the articles are from medicine, health sciences, life and physical sciences, Blackwell-Synergy is a genuinely multidisciplinary collection. There are over 55,000 articles from the field of business, economics and finance, nearly 145,000 from social and behavioral sciences. There are close to 30,000 articles from the humanities, and a modest 4,500 items from arts.

Journals are classified by subjects into 11 major subject categories, and more than 50 sub-categories. This is convenient, as it is possible to limit the search for the term nepotism, for example, to the sub-category of Politics & Political Science or Social and Behavioral Sciences to filter out articles dealing with nepotism in the real animal world.

Be forewarned, however, that some of the sub-categories resulted in 0 results in my tests, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Podiatry, Performing Arts, Equine Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, and American Studies, even when they were combined with high-frequency common terms as primary search criteria, such as horse, discrimination, or sciatica, respectively. These should not have been offered as filtering choices until the sub-categories are assigned to the journals.

There are several layers of access, and the access rights are indicated by small icons. I could not test how many OnlineOpen or free articles are in the collection, and which document types typically belong to these categories. Most of the free articles I spotted were short reports and letters to the editors, rather than feature articles. There are also articles, called OnlineEarly, which are published online in their final, corrected format, months before their print version appears – another big advantage of licensing the digital version of journals.

The Software

This redesign of the software makes it easier to navigate the collection, and it offers useful new features. Still, it is not as rich in features as another prime collection also implemented by Atypon, the Annual Reviews (AR) series, which I reviewed in this column a few months ago. I prefer the consistent use of pull down menu form and Boolean buttons of AR to Blackwell's mixed approach, but this is a rather subjective issue.

On the other hand, it is an objective fact that AR offers some novel features that would be very useful also for the Blackwell collection, and the technology solution is readily available in Atypon's software. Specifically, I would like to see quick links to bibliographic and related records in PubMed and WoS, and especially, citedness scores from WoS which automatically are displayed for AR chapter records.

There are spiffy links also in Blackwell to citing articles in collections of CrossRef participants, to the list (but not the numbers) of most cited articles in Blackwell journals in the past 3 years, and to the list of most often read (or at least downloaded) ones in the past 12 months. You can save your searches, have your favorite journal list, and use them as a filter – but there is still room for corrections and improvements.

Links are indicated by text in bull blood red, instead of the most usual blue. AR does not use blue either for links, but at least its red color is a much more subtle bordeaux. Blackwell's choice is just not intuitive, and the too much red content (which is the dominant color in Blackwell's logo and screen design, a bold switch from its former blue) on the compact result list, especially for the OnlineEarly item lists would make even a placid and sedated bull attack.

The display of the text of the links for Rights and Permissions at every record is rather distracting and it's unnecessary to show these in the short display list. Most of the users would just want to scan the result list, and browse or read some of the items. Most don't want to republish them in a book, in a journal, in a newspaper, in a pamphlet, on a CD-ROM/DVD, on a Web page, or in a course pack. I understand the "message" of the Rights and Permissions Link, but it is better to try to rub it in when the full text of the article is displayed, instead of crowding the result list, when the item may not even be available for the user.

I mentioned already a limitation of the sub-categories as filters, but there is a more important filter problem. There is an option to limit the search to those articles which are published in the issue of a journal which the library subscribes to in digital format. It is a good idea for reducing the frustration of finding a perfect article which is not accessible, but it did not work in my test.

You can see in this screen shot that the filter is set for the search, but the result list still includes items which are not available for my library. The first item shown is available but the second is not available. Not surprisingly, the search with and without this availability filter yields the same 20 hits, as if the filter had not been turned on.

The short result list does not include the publication year of the article. It does include when it was posted on the Web by Blackwell, but it has nothing to do with the actual publication year (except for some of the most current articles). Hundreds of thousands articles published in print in the 1990s were posted a decade later when Blackwell moved in on the digitization project. Yes, you can sort the result in decreasing date order, and get a feel for their relative freshness to some extent, but mere mortals do not have the faintest idea which calendar year the volume numbers correspond to in the different journals which appear in the short result list.

It is a pain in the neck that the help file of the new version does not work yet. Clicking on a term in the Table of Contents page will display, well, the Table of Contents page. You can even see on the top of the Help page the "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" dummy text used for testing page layout. Cicero was right in asserting that no one likes or seeks pain.

There was no rush; January 12 is not a magic date to the best of my knowledge, and a possible milestone, the ALA Conference, starts on January 19. Some of these shortcomings can be fixed quickly, others would take more time.

Among the digital collections of journal publishers, Blackwell-Synergy takes an important place by virtue of the popularity and importance of the majority of its journals for graduate students, researchers and faculty members. The option to search the full text of a million scholarly articles even by non-subscribers is an important asset, which is not an option in all journal collections, just think of IEEE Xplore.

The dual level classification of the journals will be an additional plus for ready-reference searching (when the problems mentioned will get fixed), especially in absence of some discipline-specific indexing/abstracting databases at the library. On the topic of deep indexing, the Blackwell collection will have an innovative feature through Illustrata (not on the publisher's platform), a new system by CSA which I tested in beta version (with half a million Blackwell records) and will review shortly.

— Péter Jacsó