How Prominent Term Paper and Essay Writers use Online Research Papers

Electronic journals, term papers, essays, research papers and related resources are assembled within electronic journal database packages. Research comparing the utility of these various database packages is haphazard. Bravo et al. (2008) sought to investigate the perceived quality and frequency of use of three common multidisciplinary database packages, ScienceDirect, Springer- Kluwer, and Wiley InterScience, at various Spanish universities during the period 2002-2005. Recorded downloads indicated the dominance of ScienceDirect, yet almost a fifth of its titles were not utilised by any of the universities under investigation. Wiley InterScience was used more frequently than Springer, though the authors note that the intensity of use was "limited". An assessment of the most popular publishers and databases at a multidisciplinary institute in India (Moghaddam & Talawar, 2008) revealed that Elsevier (owners to the rights of ScienceDirect) was used by most scholars (64%). Other publishers were used by significantly fewer respondents: ]ohn Wiley & Sons (38%); Springer-Verlag (35%); IEEE (30%); American Chemical Society (23%); Cambridge University Press ( 17%); Kluwer Academic Publishing ( 15%); Oxford University Press (15%); Blackwell Publishing (10%); Taylor & Francis (6%); and Sage Publications (3%). Investigations have often centred on the medical and health fields. In a commonly cited study undertaken amongst health faculty and students of the University of Illinois Chicago (De Groóte & Dorsch 2003) over half of the users searched MEDLINE (accessible through PubMed or Ovid MEDLINE) weekly. Other databases showed significantly weaker prominence. About three quarters of respondents had never searched CINAHL; PsyclNFO or (possibly most surprisingly) Web of Science. In their study of electronic journal user behaviour of high-level French neuroscience researchers, nearly 97% reported weekly use of bibliographic and full-text databases (Vibert et o/., 2007). Results indicated that, after PubMed (used daily by over half of these researchers), ScienceDirect was the most widely utilised database whilst BibliolNSERM and BiblioVie were used infrequently. A study of bibliographic database use by Latin American biomédical researchers was conducted by Ospina, Hérault and Cardona (2005). The 185 respondents were all published biomédical scholars representing various South American nations. The databases most used to secure biomédical information in order of prominence were MEDLINE (34%), general search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and AltaVista) (16%), on-line journals (10%), BIREME-LILACS (6%), BioMedNet (5%), the databases of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States of America (5%), and the Cochrane Library (5%). An important resource used by researchers to locate relevant material is citation databases for term paper and essay writing. Citation databases incorporate additional value as the impact of various papers can be assessed and cited material uncovered. There have been a number of comparisons between the Web of Science (WoS, in ISI Web of Knowledge) and Scopus citation databases. Gavel and Iselid (2008) calculated the journal title overlap between Scopus and WoS based on the lists provided by these citation databases. Results indicated that slightly more than half (54%) of Scopus journal titles are indexed in WoS whereas 84% of WoS journal titles are Indexed in Scopus. The authors, however, found that a large number of the WoS arts and humanities journal titles (941 of their I 130) were not indexed by Scopus. Hicks and Wang's (2010) comparison of the bibliographic coverage of several journal databases and journal lists in the humanities and social sciences clearly indicated considerably greater coverage of the social sciences by Scopus. In their discussion of the JournalBase project, Dassa, Kosmopoulos and Pumain (2010) dispute the size of the coverage difference between Scopus and WoS for the social sciences. After removing all inactive titles and duplicates from their lists, these authors found that Scopus does not host many more titles than WoS. Scopus posted 6200 social science and humanities titles (about twice the number of WoS titles); but once the inactive journals, the duplicates and types of documents other than journals (colloquia, books), had been removed, only 3453 journals remained, compared to the 2864 for WoS. Closer analysis confirmed the dominance of WoS arts and humanities titles. Of the I 166 journal titles listed under arts and humanities for WoS, only 226 are included within Scopus titles. Comparisons of the respective results of citation measures reveal little difference between these databases at aggregated levels, but results may vary significantly for various disciplines, journals or institutions.