Internet Resources: July 2022 Edition

Selected reviews of digital reference resources from the July issue of Choice.

Posted on July 7, 2022 in Internet Resources

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BCC Research. BCC Research. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.bccresearch.com/

“BCC Research provides market analysis reports in a variety of industries,” offering “some reports in the consumer arena,” though most cover the industrial and manufacturing industries, as Breezy Silver wrote for ccAdvisor. Other industries covered include Life Sciences, Sensors, Materials, Environment & Sustainability, and Commerce. The reports, which tend to focus on industries globally, “include the typical market overview and market size,” and some will even include investment information, information on product development such as patents or new developments, and country markets, Silver added.

The search box is featured at the top of the website and the site navigation—which not only directs users to Just Released and Upcoming reports but also Free Resources in the form of a blog, podcasts, and events—is featured on the left side. If not searching for a specific report, users may choose to navigate by browsing all available reports, including any upcoming or trending reports. Reports can be sorted by title, publication, or report code number, and, when searching reports, results can be narrowed by category.

Perhaps obviously, “the reports are the major strength of BCC Research” as “they provide a market analysis focusing on market overview, market breakdown, market size, market opportunities, and companies in the industries,” Silver concluded. Also useful are reports from partner publishers. An added benefit is BCC’s attempt to share information more widely through their blog and podcasts. “It can,” however, “be confusing to understand how the reports are organized” on the platform, Silver contended. “BCC Research’s main competitors would be MarketResearch.com Academic, Frost & Sullivan, Fitch Solutions reports, and IBISWorld,” all of which cover industry/market data, though in different ways. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Breezy Silver, Gast Business Library, Michigan State University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company.—Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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GEOSCAN. Canada Communication Group. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://geoscan.nrcan.gc.ca/starweb/geoscan/servlet.starweb?path=geoscan/geoscan_e.web#

“Managed by the Government of Canada Publications, GEOSCAN is an Open Access database that collates the Earth Sciences publications of the Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN) … [including] almost 90,000 records of Mining, Materials and Energy, Geological Survey of Canada publications, Topographic Maps, Remote Sensing, and Geodesy publications,” wrote Jane C. Duffy for ccAdvisor. Records and full-text publications on topics related to sustainable development, mineral and energy resources, and landmass, are continually added to the site as they become available.

With a practical and easy-to-use interface, “GEOSCAN features two different levels of searching: basic and advanced, both of which are effective and suitable for various levels of researcher from beginner to advanced,” Duffy noted. Basic Search is a single keyword search box that yields both brief and full records as search results. As Duffy detailed, “the brief record is quite substantive, providing access to article title, author(s)’ names, the journal or monograph title, page ranges, JPG images of first pages, Open Access designation, DOIs, and Natural Resources Canada accession numbers.” The full-access option adds to these access points by also offering plain language summaries and abstracts; series titles; and links to full-text and illustrations, including cartographic information. Advanced Search “allows the searcher to work directly … with quite a granular index,” which is a list of “exact terms within the access points, keywords, title, author, and subject, that are used in the GEOSCAN database.”

Ultimately, although it is “a relatively small database serving specialized research interests, GEOSCAN is very reliable and user-friendly for the general researcher as well.” As Duffy concluded, “GEOSCAN is a unique database with no direct competitors,” though “its contents … are also made available through GeoRef, ProQuest, and EBSCO discovery products.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Jane C. Duffy, MacEwan University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company.—Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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Linguistics Abstracts Online. EBSCO. Contact publisher for pricing.
http://www.linguisticsabstracts.com/

Currently containing more than 768,000 records, Linguistics Abstracts Online (LAO) “is an indexing and abstracting database” that “indexes over 800 journals in linguistics and related disciplines, with the bulk of coverage beginning in 1985,” as Anna L. Shparberg wrote for ccAdvisor. Covering “numerous fields … such as applied and computational linguistics, phonetics and phonology, deaf studies and education, psychology, communication, and speech pathology, among others,” LAO will serve as a useful resource for those conducting research in applied linguistics.

“The EBSCO interface allows for robust and straightforward searching, with the usual menu of Basic and Advanced search options,” Shparberg detailed. Searchable fields include abstract, author, publication name, subject, and geographic terms, although, since LAO is an indexing and abstracting database, full-text searching is not available. The database’s 11 indexes (Author, Author-Supplied Keywords, Document Type, Entry Date, Geographic Terms, Headings, ISSN, ISBN, Language, Publication Name, and Year of Publication) are useful in spite of peculiarities that arise from being machine-generated. As Shparberg elaborated, “checking a box in front of any index term and using the Search button brings up the complete list of results containing th[at] term.” However, the “lack of controlled vocabulary and name authority file,” and subsequent lack of a subject index, remains a weakness that the indexes cannot completely make up for.

Ultimately, “LAO benefits from its access to the robust EBSCO platform and its array of search options,” making it “a valid point of entry into research in linguistics,” as Shparberg contended. “Both by size and scope of coverage, the best comparable product to LAO is Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)” from ProQuest. Other comparable products (though somewhat less so) include MLA Bibliography and Linguistic Bibliography Online from Brill. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Anna L. Shparberg, Fondren Library, Rice University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company.—Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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TDM Studio. ProQuest. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://about.proquest.com/en/products-services/TDM-Studio/

“TDM Studio is an integrated platform [from] ProQuest for data and text mining,” wrote Anamika Megwalu and Anne Marie Engelsen for ccAdvisor. When conducting research that requires data and text mining, it can be challenging to “[identify] sources for data extraction, [secure] copyright permission, [clean] datasets,” and “[find] appropriate software for analysis.” However, “TDM Studio was created to alleviate such issues by offering accessible full-text content to create datasets, embedded integration with Jupyter Notebook for data cleaning and data analysis, and a visualization studio for data geographic analysis and topic modeling,” Megwalu and Engelsen noted. As a result, researchers can now search for relevant data, create large datasets, and analyze their data much faster. Further, as a cloud-based system, TDM Studio enables multiple users to work on a project concurrently, facilitating collaboration. 

The clean user interface enables even novice text and data miners to easily create datasets from publication titles or ProQuest databases, which can be sorted using either the browse or search functions. Once a dataset is compiled, “the Visualization dashboard can provide data visualizations with limited features,” such as geographic or topic analysis. As Megwalu and Engelsen elaborated, “geographic analysis provides an interactive map with instances displayed as bubbles of increasing size,” while “topic analysis … finds common topics within the selected datasets by grouping key words with high instances within the dataset.”

Megwalu and Engelson concluded that “the strength of TDM Studio lies in its integration of ProQuest database content,” which will be very useful for researchers across the social sciences. Similar products include Nexis Data Lab from LexisNexis, Constellate from JSTOR, and Gale Digital Scholar Lab by Gale, though each offers different content. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Anamika Megwalu, San Jose State University, and Anne Marie Engelsen, San Jose State University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company.—Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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