Content Overlap and Replacement Cost Analyses: Tools to Evaluate Abstracting/Indexing (A&I) and Full-Text Databases in Science and Engineering

Abstract

Shrinking serials acquisition budgets and increasing subscription costs for access to bibliographic and full-text databases are forcing academic librarians to reevaluate the content needs of their faculty and students. This article showcases two methods to attain a firmer grasp of the content and value of databases: comparison of journal title overlap among various abstracting/indexing databases using the JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT), and cost analysis of unbundling a full-text journal package.

Keywords:

• bibliographic databases
• abstracting/indexing databases
• full-text databases
• JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool
• cost analysis
• unbundling
• journal packages
• serials acquisition
• database subscription

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dana Roth, the Chemistry Librarian at California Institute of Technology Libraries, for his insights into the content analysis of bibliographic databases.