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Magazine Index Plus or Academic Index?

By Christine H. Guyonneau Reference Librarian University of Indianapolis

A comparison of two major INFOTRAC databases.

For small university and college libraries with limited budgets, innovative technology is often prohibitively expensive, and choosing the best available database to fill the needs of the community often brings a dilemma. Aware of this problem, Information Access Company (IAC) offered an attractive alternative to institutions that could not afford the purchase of its INFOTRAC database: it marketed a smaller database, INFOTRAC II, which indexed about one-third of the journals contained in INFOTRAC and which IAC named Magazine Index Plus. Like its parent counterpart, Magazine Index Plus operates on a CD-ROM. The laser disk is updated monthly, and the journals are indexed as far back as 1983. It also covers the last 90 days of the New York Times. However, one of the major drawbacks of this IAC product for any academic library is the lack of scholarly titles. The majority of the journals indexed can be found in Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. If this type of information can be useful to the first-year student getting acquainted with the research process, it was its limitations for the senior, the honors student and even more so for graduates who will not find bibliographic citations to People Weekly, Audio or Ms appreciated by their thesis advisers. To address this need, the manufacturer is now offering a new database, Academic Index.

A twelve-month subscription to Academic Index or Magazine Index Plus costs $4,000 a year.

This study is an attempt to examine both databases and determine which one is the better in an academic environment.

Methodology

First, the coverage of the journals included in Magazine Index Plus and Academic Index was closely examined.

Then, using a list of topics most frequently researched at the University of Indianapolis Library, 25 subjects were selected and searched in the February 1988 update of each database. The selection was done in such a way as to represent broad classifications likely to be indexed in the new journals. Some topics—such as acid rain, divorce, school discipline, and market surveys—were searched in their entirety. Others were only searched under certain subclassifications. The main objective of the search was to find out 1) the amount of overlap and 2) the reason for certain large imbalances.

TABLE 1. Number of citations found in each database for a particular topic, and the amount common to both.

	MAGAZINE INDEX		ACADEMIC INDEX
TOPICS	TOTAL CITATIONS	CITATIONS NOT IN ACADEMIC INDEX	TOTAL CITATIONS	CITATIONS NOT IN MAGAZINE INDEX	CITATIONS COMMON TO BOTH INDEXES
Acid Rain (All Sub-headings)	213	51	179	17	162
AIDS (Disease)—Care and Treatment	62	6	61	5	56
—History	4	—	8	4	4
—Politics and Government	10	2	14	6	8
Apartheid—Economic Conditions	22	3	24	5	19
—Foreign and Public Opinions	31	6	31	6	25
—History	5	1	5	1	4
—International Aspects	7	—	11	4	7
—Moral and Religious Aspects	7	2	7	2	5
—Political Aspects	28	1	29	2	27
Divorce (All Sub-headings)	33	19	16	2	14
Feminism and Literature—History and Criticism	8	2	10	4	6
Fiction—Technique	99	94	6	1	5
Gifted Children—Education	26	10	25	9	16
—Psychology	6	3	8	5	3
—Research	1	—	4	3	1
Market Surveys (All Sub-headings)	36	30	31	25	6
National Socialism (All Sub-headings)	43	6	54	17	37
Organizational Behavior (All Sub-headings)	36	23	50	37	13
Organizational Change (All Sub-headings)	19	17	13	11	2
Organizational Effectiveness—Analysis	8	5	7	4	3
—Technique	9	7	2	—	2
School Discipline (All Sub-headings)	28	7	30	9	21
Women in Advertising (All Sub-headings)	8	4	24	20	4
Women in the Advertising Industry (All Sub-headings)	2	1	6	5	1
TOTAL	751	300	655	204	451

In a third phase the bibliographic citations were analyzed for discrepancies. It should be noted that since Academic Index includes some journals beginning with 1985 and others beginning with 1987, only the references dating from 1985 and found in Magazine Index Plus have been accounted for.

Coverage

Magazine Index Pluscovers 405 journals beginning in January 1983 as well as the last 90 days of the New York Times. Academic Index covers 388 journals: 192 (49.5%) start coverage in 1987, and 196 (50.5 %) start coverage in 1985. The New York Tiînes is covered for the past six months.

However, it is interesting to note that 171 journals (44.1%) overlap with Magazine Index Plus (although the coverage is not as retrospective). Among the 219 new journals, only 10 were not covered by any major paper indexes. All the others are indexed in at least one of the following sources: 70 (32.0%) are indexed in Humanities Index, 67 (30.6%) in Social Sciences Index, 31 (14.2%) in Education Index, 17 (7.8%) in Business Periodicals Index, 17 (7.8 %) in Current Contents, 5 in PAIS, 3 in Historical Abstracts, 3 in Book Review Digest, 2 in Biology and Agriculture Index, 2 in Psychological Abstracts, 1 in CINAHL, 1 in Consumer Index, and 1 in Work Related Abstracts.

From a closer analysis of the bibliographic citations, three points are noteworthy: the amount of citations in each database, their sources, and the reliability of the indexing.

From the table below, the search of the 25 topics provided a total of 1,406 citations: 751 citations were found in Magazine Index Plus and 655 in Academic Index. A total of 35.5% were duplicates, which comes as no surprise since we already know that 44.1 % of the titles overlap in each database. Nearly 40 % of the citations in Magazine Index Plus were not in Academic Index, and 31.1% of the citations in Academic Index were not in Magazine Index Plus. Academic Index seems to offer fewer citations.

If we examine the citations for Fiction— Technique, 99 were found in Magazine Index Plus, while only 6 were in Academic Index. However, 94 of those references came from Writer’s Digest and Writer, which are not included in Academic Index. A similar imbalance occurs for Acid Rain. Seventeen of the 51 original citations in Magazine Index Plus come from either Electrical World or American Forests, which have also been excluded from Academic Index. A last example concerns the topic of Divorce. Most of the references come from Redbook, Harper’s, Chatelaine, and U.S. Catholic, all of which have been excluded from Academic Index. So we can see that some highly specialized journals have been dropped in Academic Index in favor of others not so relevant to the topic searched. However, besides those exceptions, Academic Index contains more original references for 13 topics, fewer references for five and the same number for three, which is not so bad if one takes into consideration the fact that many journals in Academic Index are covered only since 1987.

Finally, a comparison between the references included in the databases and the advertised coverage of the journals exposes a weakness inherent to all indexing services: lack of reliability. Under many topics, some citations appear in one database, but not in both as should be the case according to the list of journals to be included in both databases.

Take for example the topic of National Socialism. Two citations appeared in Academic Index but not in Magazine Index Plus, although one had been led to assume coverage of these journals in both databases. The first one referred to an article in Time (May 26, 1986) under the “Collectibles” sub-heading, and the second one to an article from Life (November 1986) under the “Conferences and Congresses” sub-heading. The reverse is also true. Under the same topic, two citations were included in Magazine Index Plus but not in Academic Index. The first article was by Michael R. Marcus in American Scholar, vol.57 (Winter 1988). The second one, on “Village Life in Nazi Germany” in History Today, vol.35 (November 1985), is even more puzzling since another article from the same issue has been included. In summary, four citations under National Socialism which should have been duplicated were not.

A last instance relates to the topic of Acid Rain. Although Environment should be carried by both databases, three citations dated 1987 are missing from Academic Index. One can assume that the lack of inclusion of a very recent article might be corrected by the next update. However, what can one think of the less recent missing references?

In view of the idiosyncrasies of each database, the question remains: which one is better for an academic environment? It is obvious that Magazine Index Plus is the winner in quantity. Is it also a winner in quality? The list of journals covered in Academic Index certainly proves it is the winner in that capacity. However, there is room for improvement in the selection of journals for Academic Index. Should People Weekly, McLean’s, Ms, Car and Driver, to cite only a few, be considered scholarly in content? Should Electrical World, Design News, American Forests, Business Horizons, Sales and Marketing News be excluded although they contribute to the majority of citations for Acid Rain, Organizational Behavior, and Market Surveys in Magazine Index Plus? Since a major criterion of quality in research is peer review, should Academic Index expand its coverage of refereed journals and restrict its coverage of non-refereed journals? Does Academic Index conform to Richard Carney’s ideal when, in his article on INFOTRAC, he comments: “Whether a new product addresses a specific need and meets that need should be paramount in the evaluation process.”¹ And since he believes that “no single tool is capable of fulfilling all the needs of a reference center” and that “the question becomes one of evaluating the available tools and the impact each might have on the overall demands placed upon the reference center,”² why not refine the coverage of Academic Index and realize its potential as a better reference tool in an academic environment?

Notes

1. Richard D. Carney, “Infotrac vs. the Confounding of Technology and its Applications,” Database, June 1986, p. 56.
2. Carney, p. 58.