Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

September 2007

Title: PILOTS
Publisher: National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Dept. of Veteran Affairs
URL: www.ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/publications/pilots/ at NCPTSD
URL: www.csa.com/htbin/dbrng.cgi?username=ncptsd&access=ncptsd55&db=pilots-set-c at CSA
Cost: Free (both at NCPTSD and CSA)
Tested: 1–7, September, 2007

The Context

Three years ago I gave this database a very favorable review in my Database Picks and Pans column. In light of the events and developments of man–made and natural disasters of the past three years, its importance has increased even more.

It is quite telling that in the stable of Dialog Information services there were 33 databases that had records with the acronym PTSD in the title of documents published in 1996, and 65 in 2006. The total number of hits was 649 and 2,041, respectively, but it is the 3.19 growth rate that is interesting, not the absolute number of hits. This is because there is significant overlap among the sources covered by the databases, and the number of hits in the top-ranked Current Contents database has to be adjusted because it counts both the article record and the table of contents record where the title of the article is listed (although this can be eliminated in a more complex search).

The median value of the growth rate for the top 20 databases present on both the 1996 and 2006 result lists is 2.82. It is natural that this tripling in the ratio indirectly reflects not only the increase in the research, but also the overall interest in the topic, and the prevalence of this serious mental health problem.

There are telling differences at the database level behind the average and median values of the overall growth rate across the 485 databases that I tested with the still most powerful DIALINDEX database which Dialog developed in its golden years, a good decade before we first heard the word metasearch. As expected, most databases were very close to the average growth rate, and some were surprisingly much higher. In PsycINFO the growth rate was 2.75, in Social Search 2.39, in MEDLINE 3.45, in EMBASE 3.71 in EMCARE 2.92.

The most surprising numbers at first sight were produced by NCJRS, with a growth rate 9.50 from 2 to 19 papers in 1996 and 2006, respectively. However, it is reasonable because it reflects the huge criminal implications of ASD and PTSD. Similarly, the 9.09 increase of growth rate from 11 to 100 in the Health and Wellness database of the Gale Group reflects the huge increase of the coverage of the topic in the consumer–oriented health publications, The rate of increase in SciSearch (6.41), Elsevier’s Biobase (6.00), and in BIOSIS Previews (8.47) probably indicates the intensifying involvement of the chemical research and the pharmaceutical industry in the treatment phase.

The numbers may be influenced also by the possibility of extended source coverage by 2006. The fact that neither the LC MARC, nor the British Books in Print directory had any book published in 1996 with PTSD in the title, and both had six such books published in 2006 alone, speaks for itself. The appearance of business and news databases on the list by 2006 also has an obvious reason, PTSD has serious financial implications, and it is very often discussed in general interest news magazines. In this increasingly multi–disciplinary and multi–faceted world of traumatic stress disorders an open access database like PILOTS is very welcome.

The Content

Size

At the very end of August 2007, PILOTS had 32,283 indexing/abstracting records. Three years ago when I tested the database, it had 26,300 records. In spite of the solid growth, it is still a very small database in the company of the multi–disciplinary mega indexing/abstracting databases. However, PILOTS has a sharp topical focus – all of its records are about primary documents related to the topic of traumatic stress disorders. If we do the same test search to find records of documents which have the acronym PTSD in their title, PILOTS becomes a big fish in the small pond. It has 2,260 such records, while PsycINFO has 2001, Social SciSearch 1538, EMBASE 1,262, Medline 1,208, and SciSearch 1,030 – i.e all of them have fewer records for the query. The total is 7,039, but after retaining only the unique records, the total drops to 3,096.

PILOTS has only 75% of the set of unique records combined from the 5 mega databases mentioned above, but it is free. So is PubMed, but it has only 1,208 records for the test search.

PILOTS also keeps its advantage when doing the search again by including the two spelled out variants of the term in the title, with and without hyphens (7,317 records), and when expanding the search from the title to the abstract (13,787 records). Only PsycINFO comes close with 6,289 and 12,662 hits, respectively.

Source Coverage

The reason for PILOTS’superiority in coverage of topics related to traumatic stress disorders is its very broad source coverage. Although there is no journal list for this database, scrolling through the unusually consistent journal name index indicates that there are records for papers published in 2,600 journals. The best and most productive psychology and psychiatry journals for stress disorders appear with a significant number of records, such as the Journal of Traumatic Stress (114), American Journal of Psychiatry (879), Journal of Clinical Psychology (525), Military Medicine (338), British Journal of Psychiatry (301), Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (259), Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology (275) to name a few. The depth of coverage of these journals should not be compared to those in PsycINFO, Web of Science, Medline or EMBASE, simply because PILOTS is selective for every journal, while the mega-databases are meant to provide cover-to-cover coverage for the core journals in every aspects of psychology, psychiatry, mental health, medicine, etc. The special value is that PILOTS combines records for articles from these mainstream psychology/psychiatry journals with those from criminology, sociology and health care, and several other disciplines.

I intentionally avoided saying that PILOTS covers 2,600 journals (and probably for the same reason NCPTSD does not brag with a journal list) simply because for many of the journals there are only a few records – only for the articles that deal with traumatic stress disorder. One might ask why there is only one record – for a rather old article from U.S. News & World Reports but not for 35 other cover stories about the subject of PTSD in that magazine, and why there aren’t more than three records for substantial articles in other general interest news magazines such as Newsweek which also had substantial cover stories.

Probably the reasons is that these were added at the start of creating the database, and as their digital versions often became freely available on the Web (at least for subscribers as is the case with the superb and complete collection of TIME) and new scholarly journals were launched, the coverage shifted to those.

Looking at the top 100 journals from PsycINFO for the PTSD/TI query, I could find almost all of them present in PILOTS. One of the few negative cases involved Journal of Mental Science, which was present with only a single record in PILOTS while PsycINFO had 18 records for articles from this journal with PTSD in the title. The only other highly relevant journal for stress disorders that is not covered by PILOTS at all is Illness, Crisis & Loss, which is undoubtedly relevant for the scope of PILOTS.

The source coverage is good also from the perspective of the genre of the sources. While journal articles represent 73% of the source documents (23,659 items), there are records for 1,024 books (3.2%), 5379 book chapters (16.6%) and 2,118 dissertations (6.6%). The rest is a set of about 100 records for reports and pamphlets.

Language Coverage

As for language, 93.5% of the records are for English language documents. Again, this is justified. It is somewhat surprising that French and German are the second and third most productive languages in PILOTS, with 616 and 575 documents, respectively. I would have expected Spanish to be second as there have been many more natural disasters (as well as man–made ones by dictators and military juntas) in Central and Latin America which cause acute and posttraumatic stress disorders, then in Francophile countries and Germany, Austria and Switzerland combined. On the other hand, it is not surprising that Japanese language materials represent the fifth largest segment as the natural disasters (and the traumatic stress of the perfectionist work ethics) obviously motivated aggressive research of the mitigation and treatment of acute and posttraumatic stress disorders, and publications in the native language, not just in English, for wider reach. There are more than 200 records for papers in other languages, but only the ones in Russian, Portuguese and Italian are remarkable.

Scope

You would not find any record about the concept of library anxiety in PILOTS, but I don’t hold it against the database. There are anxieties and there are anxieties. ASD and PTSD are listed under the anxiety disorder category and it is likely that there will be many more in the soon-to-be-published bible of psychology and psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V (DSM–V), but it may not include library anxiety yet, although in PsycINFO there are already two records about that anxiety, and in some library science databases you find it as descriptor or identifier for 30–40 records.

Soon this trend will motivate the pharmaceutical industry to produce yet another medication with serious side effects, and a few corny TV commercials urging you to ask your doctor if LibraLax is right for you, and I will get notice from a physician that a student in the LIS Program should not be exposed to the traumatic experience of looking up a journal in the brick–and–mortar library as it might trigger a library anxiety attack. Online–only classes already have taken good care of the classroom–anxiety syndrome, and the fast-growing number of bachelor students getting diplomas without ever entering a classroom and/or a library will improve the statistics on educational achievements, and the budget situation of colleges. Good for the goose, good for the gander but not necessarily for the customers, clients and patients served directly or indirectly by these diploma holders.

The National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (NCPTSD) does an outstanding job in educating and informing about the importance of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of stress disorders.

If you don’t have yet ASD then a friend or family member or colleague or classmate is likely to have it, abeit you and they may not know about it, as the disorder often remains undiagnosed and untreated. If ASD were not bad enough it is often just a prelude to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There are no reliable and current statistics about the prevalence of ASD and PTSD, but events like the 2004 tsunami, the 2005 hurricane Katrina, the ever climbing death toll and the number of more–than–traumatic injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, the relentless wave of terrorism around the world makes this open access database increasingly important.

The Software

Until recently, PILOTS was made freely accessible through the good offices of the National Information Services Corporation (NISC), and its equally good software, BiblioLine. It is still available through NISC, but now it requires subscription. Luckily, CSA (now ProQuest after the merger) stepped in as a host with free services to anyone. Libraries which subscribe to ProQuest-hosted databases can ask the company to include PILOTS along with those databases.

This is important because no matter how good a job NISC did in hosting PILOTS for free, it had a much more limited reach than CSA and ProQuest, simply because far fewer libraries had subscriptions to the databases hosted by NISC than to those hosted by CSA and ProQuest.

The Illumina software has an appealing user interface, good search features, customizable output options, very good integration with the powerful and intuitive RefWorks reference management software. It brings out —if not the most— a lot from the exceptionally consistent and clean controlled vocabulary of PILOTS. CSA offers browsable indexes by authors, descriptors (including not only topical terms, but also personal names, journal name, publication type, language and tests and measures (used in the research projects and surveys). It illustrates that an open access database can be squeaky clean while the expensive and brutally mistreated subscription–based database specializing in mental health, IFI/Plenum’s Mental Health Abstracts, has disgraced the subscribers with an appalling controlled vocabulary for subject term, and a rapidly emaciated journal base about which I complained often enough and loud enough to make its inferiority clear, so the only online host DIALOG finally dropped it from its offerings.

Back to the CSA implementation, it would help the users to see the posting information in the thesaurus and in all the indexes, which show how many records have the author name, the descriptor or the journal name being looked up. Browsing the journal name index, for example, would make it easy to identify the most productive journals on the topic of PTSD.

PILOTS links to more than 1,000 full–text documents authored by experts of the National Center for PTSD, published not only in its own journals but also in well–known, top–ranking journals, and as reports. These are in PDF format, and the easiest way to look for them is just searching for the acronym pdf in the Anywhere index. This could be replaced by a filter check–box. Much more importantly PILOTS can lead the users to more than 10,000 full–text articles.

There are digital object identifiers (DOI) in more than 10,000 records (the number doubled in the past three years!). The majority of the articles are not open access, but if users search the database from a computer whose IP address authenticates access to the full–text digital collection of the source journals, and pops up the full–text record directly or leads to it through the journal’s own bibliographic record.

This is great but could be even better if the DOI would be added to all the records which refer to articles which were assigned a DOI. This is feasible to implement even retroactively because records for many issues of several volumes are already enhanced by DOI, so it would require mostly known item searches not a wild goose chase. But there is another even better option to automatically generate the DOI for at least some journals.

For example, one of the most important journal for PTSD is the American Journal of Psychiatry. There are 879 records in PILOTS for papers and editorial materials published in that journal, but only 244 have a DOI to link users to the article.

However, there is good news. The DOI is intelligently designed for APJ published by the American Psychiatric Association because the part of the DOI which follows the prefix of standardized DOI resolver and the publisher identifier — dx.doi.org/10.1176 — is a string made up from the acronym appi.apj to identify the publishing house, American Psychiatric Publishing Inc. and the journal acronym, followed by the volume number, issue number and the starting page number.

It is easier shown than said, just click on this URL and you should be taken to this article’s record as if it had the DOI in PILOTS even if it is absent.

In many cases this simple and easy–to–automate step can grace users with the full–text of the articles even if they are not using PILOTS through a library, or the library does not have a digital subscription to the journal, simply because the publisher and/or its digital facilitator makes hundreds or —in case of HighWire Press and its clients— thousands of articles published in journals covered by PILOTS freely available for the public immediately or with some reasonable delay (6–12 months embargo) as this small excerpt indicates for the query on PTSD in the title field. Out of the 440 hits, 180 are freely available from HighWire Press.

How many of the more than 10,000 DOI links in PILOTS would take users to a free full-text? I can’t answer that question, but I can tell that from the 34,000+ full text articles of the American Journal of Psychiatry available digitally, more than 6,000 are available free of charge for anyone. For the influential British Journal of Psychiatry, there are about 2,700 articles available digitally, and 86% of them are free of charge.

It is more than icing on the cake that for some of the most important journals in PTSD matters HighWire Press is the digital facilitator for the publishers and has many additional software features that significantly enhance the search experience as I discussed in my earlier detailed review of the best of the digital facilitators. Since my review, the total number of free articles available through HighWire Press in one fell swoop without the need to go to the publishers’ digital archives, grew to nearly 1.8 million.

The enhancement of the good software by automatic DOI construction would add a lot of extra value to the worthy content, even if not all the publishers chose so smartly the content and syntax of their digital object identifiers for all their titles as to allow the automatic construction of DOI link from the metadata. Adding open–URL links instead of DOI&ndashlinks constructed from the bibliographic data elements in the record on the fly is another possibility to make more users fully satisfied.

I wished to illustrate the DOI linking feature with constructing a link to an excellent paper about an especially timely and pertinent issue of PTSD, just published in the September, 2007 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, but it was so new that the DOI probably was not yet deposited or activated in CrossRef, which should get much credit for the development and operation of the DOI–based linking. Here is another type of link that could be constructed from metadata and lead users directly from the bibliographic record (when it becomes available in PILOTS) to the free full–text of the article about the Differences in PTSD Prevalence and Associated Risk Factors Among World Trade Center Disaster Rescue and Recovery Workers.

I trust that such library resource will lessen the suffering of those inflicted by library anxiety. I indeed saw suffering and sufferer in the same sentence as library anxiety. As I told, PILOT does not have information about this anxiety, but its valuable content about many severe anxieties and real disorders deserves support from those that host it, as well as from the Department of Veteran Affairs whose site is as exemplary as the Walter Reed Army Medical Center is not, and offers many other high quality resources on top of the excellent PILOTS database.  

— Péter Jacsó