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All three databases I'm reviewing in this issue are from the field of physics (and in the last issue, one of my picks was the Astrophysics Data System). Is this some neophyte enthusiasm of mine? No, physics has never been my strong point. I hardly understand more than the prepositions and the articles (not journal articles, but the definite and indefinite articles) of physics papers. However, librarians and information professionals excel at searching and finding, even when the topic or the entire discipline is unfamiliar.
I chose PROLA and SPIRES-HEP as my picks because both show excellent examples of the smartest use of the citation data to rank results (in addition to traditional other sorting criteria) that leads even nonsubscribers to the most cited papers on a topic in physics. The Physical Review On-Line Archive (PROLA) of the American Physical Society (APS) does this for its own journals, and SPIRES-HEP the High-Energy Physics Literature Database of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, does this primarily with its traditional bibliographic indexing database. I chose as my pan the Scitation database from the American Institute of Physics (which was my pick several years ago under its old name, OJPS) because it has neglected its primary role of making searchable the full text of its worthy journals and conference proceedings. Instead, it spends more energy on being an aggregator and digital facilitator of publishers of physics literature. The latter is a useful role, but others could do that, while only AIP can help users fully discover the content of all the AIP publications.
the picks
PROLA
The original Physical Review journal was launched at Cornell University, and until recently, I used Cornell's mirror site of the digital archive of the dozen publications of the American Physical Society. Well, the publisher revamped, and its continuously enhanced PROLA site (http://prola.aps.org) has become a better option. With the novel features introduced in the past few months, it sets a model for how to bring out the best of a state-of-the-art digital archive. APS is a delight to look at and work with. It has nearly half a million papers that are full-text searchable even by nonsubscribers, who also can see the bibliographic records and the abstracts for free.
True, these free options...