Online Currents 2000 Vol.15 Issue.5, June 2000

by Pamela Johnstone

Introduction
As a psychology graduate (a long time ago) and an information professional in a counselling organisation (not quite so long ago), I have always had an interest in psychological information. Until recently, by far the most obvious source for such information was the American Psychological Association's (APA) PsycINFO database and its CD-ROM subsets (PsychLit and ClinPSYCH). PsycINFO is a bibliographic database with abstracts.

Access to the PsycINFO database has always been relatively expensive (relative to databases such as Medline, for example). An organisation subscribing to the CD-ROM database (with quarterly updates) might expect to pay in the vicinity of $8,360 each year. Casual access via services such as Dialog obviates the need for a subscription to the database, but when charging is based on number of items printed or downloaded, the cost of an individual search can be expensive if more than a few relevant items are retrieved. In addition, it seemed to me (when I was working in the field about four years ago) that the APA had no intention of lowering its prices in order to maximize sales; its philosophy appeared to be one of higher prices for lower sales.

So recently, when I read about two psychological databases on the Internet, I decided to investigate. These two services are the APA's PsycINFO Direct on the PsycPORT Web site (http://www.psycport.com ) and the e-psyche service (http://www.e-psyche.net ).

e-psyche
e-psyche is a brand new abstracts database designed to compete with the APA's PsycINFO. It aims to be the most comprehensive and current research tool in the field of psychology. Over 4,200 journals in psychology and related disciplines will be covered, nearly three times the number covered by PsycINFO (1,400) . Features of the database will be:

• weekly updates
• abstracts to be entered within 30 days of receipt of source material
• links to full text
• citation indexing
• thesaurus usage – each record will be assigned an average of five applied subject terms
          from a thesaurus which currently contains 5,000 terms

Three basic markets for the database have been identified – corporate, academic and professional. e-psyche plans to partner with established online distributors for the corporate and academic markets, but is planning a Web-based service for the individual psychology practitioner. The company is committed to subscription pricing (i.e. fixed-base pricing for unlimited access) in all three markets. The e-psyche database will not be competing with PsycINFO's back files which go back over 100 years.

As of going to press, it was not yet possible to search the e-psyche database on the company's Web site, so I was not able to compare the search interface or software with that of PsycINFO. However, a sample record (see Figure 1) reveals the record structure to be remarkably similar to that of records from the PsycINFO database.

Figure 1: e-psyche Sample Record
PsycINFO DIRECT
PsycINFO DIRECT is part of the APA's PsycPORT Web site, which offers a collection of psychology resources including descriptions of APA books and journals, selected full text articles from the journals, selected news items, the APA Monitor, the Psychcrawler search engine (for searching the Web), and PsychINFO Direct. I was especially interested in the latter. A sample record from PsycINFO DIRECT is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: PsycINFO DIRECT Sample Record
There is a demo version of the database which can be searched for free; I have no idea of the size of the demo database but when I searched on "Munchausen" I retrieved a reasonable number of records (12) which nearly dissuaded me from even trying the complete database. However, I could not restrain myself when I discovered that a casual user is able to purchase a 24-hour unlimited subscription for US $9.95. There is no cost-per-record viewed, printed or downloaded. As a long-time advocate of casual user access and appropriate pricing, this is one of the best pricing options for casual users that I have come across. I am not often given to compulsive buying behaviour but in this case I could not resist; I promptly took out my Mastercard and away I went.

I must admit I was impressed by the PsycINFO search facility. The service provides access to all PsycINFO journals, book and chapter records from 1887 to the present. Journal articles can be searched in pre-set groupings of 1887 – 1989, 1990 – 1995 and 1996 – present. Three search boxes allow searches to be restricted to a number of fields (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: PsycINFO DIRECT Search Screen
A comprehensive Search Guide is provided; it is clear that most, if not all, of the advanced search tools/features that one would expect from a service such as Dialog are available for the more experienced searcher:

• truncation (?, *, #)
• Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
• proximity operators (ADJ, NEAR/n, W/n)
• phrase searching (single quotes)
• field searching ( e.g. psychopharmacolog*:title, keywords)
• limiting (by population, age group, form/content type, content classification

          code, language, year)

Conclusion
In conclusion, as a long time online searcher, I usually remain unconvinced that any Web service can be as good as a direct online service, especially when factors such as speed and advanced search features are taken into account. However, this time I may have to "eat my hat" so to speak; I was impressed by the search features and the speed of retrieval (admittedly, I did do the search on Easter Saturday which would have been Good Friday in the US – perhaps not a good test).

As the e-psyche database was not operational on the Web site at the time of writing, it was not possible to do a full comparison of e-psyche and PsycINFO DIRECT; however, assuming e-psyche will deliver on its promises, I prepared a summary table of the two services' features.

Figure 4: Service Features Table
e-psyche / PsycINFO Direct
 

In summary, I can only conclude that, at a time when there is considerable debate on the future of bibliographic indexing and abstracting, it is encouraging to learn of a new abstracts database being created with a larger coverage (at least in number of journals) than the principal database in the psychology field. It is even more pleasing when one suspects that the advent of competition may have been part of the reason for the APA finally allowing reasonably-priced casual access to their valuable database.
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Pamela Johnstone is an information consultant with Enterprise Information Management Pty Ltd.

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