Rita Barsun

Greetings to all and wishes for a wonderful new year! For my last column for The Scholar-Practitioner, it is truly a pleasure to be able to share some good news with you about the Walden Library databases.

CINAHL Plus with Full Text
CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Applied Health Literature) is now CINAHL Plus with Full Text. Formerly, only four Walden students could search CINAHL simultaneously, which resulted in the possibility of being bumped out in the middle of a search. Now there is provision for 12 simultaneous users. This table will give you an idea of the difference between the two databases.
 

Feature	CINAHL	CINAHL Plus with Full Text
No. of journals indexed	2,717	3,001
Start date of indexing	1982	1937
Evidence-based care sheets	0	92
No. of full-text or linked full-text journals	69	32
No. of full-text journals not available in our other EBSCO databases	64	174
Start date for PDF full text	2000	1937

The new CINAHL has the same neat search features as the old one. Now, don’t forget about the wonderful CINAHL Headings feature! If you’ve forgotten how to use it, ask the Walden Library folks: waldenlb@waldenu.edu or 800-437-0501.

Criminal Justice Periodicals Index
Criminal Justice Abstracts, which is a CSA database with no links to full-text articles, will soon be replaced by Criminal Justice Periodicals Index (CJPI), a ProQuest product similar to the ProQuest Nursing Journals database. CJPI provides citations and abstracts for more than 190 journals, 55 of which are available in full text from 1981 to the present.

Since we don’t yet have access to CJPI, I can’t attest to how easy or challenging it is to use. Will it make life easier for those of you in the area of criminal justice? Let’s hope so!

This link will take you to a guide to CJPI developed by librarians at Westfield State College. You will not be able to access the database, but at least it will give you a preview of the search interface and other features:
http://www.lib.wsc.ma.edu/cjpi/cjpi.htm

Remember: Ignore the “ACCESS” information on the above site, as you won’t be able to get into Westfield’s CJPI.

SocIndex
How many times have you pulled your hair in frustration as you tried to search Social Services Index or Sociological Abstracts? SocIndex is an EBSCO database much easier to search than the CSA databases. It doesn’t have a Thesaurus button, but the Subject Terms button works almost as well. There hasn’t been enough time for us to put SocIndex through its paces, but we should be able to guide you through it by the middle of January.

Have you ever given up in despair because of the time it took to try to track down the actual articles in the CSA databases once you identified them? Those days are gone, thanks to SocIndex, which provides full-text PDF documents back to 1895.

Here is another handy-dandy table to let you compare SocIndex with our soon-to-be-abandoned CSA databases:

Hold on to your seats, folks! SocIndex even has some “online books”—547 of them. Why the quotation marks? So far I’ve not found any entire books, just chapters ranging in length from one page to 70 pages. Most are around 15–20 pages.

Access to 6,711 conference proceedings is a decided additional boon, as conference proceedings evade even our most talented and persistent library staff.

Mental Measurements Yearbook (MMY)
This is a great tool for researchers. Until now, if you found a review on the publicly accessible site, you had to pay $15 for it. Now the reviews are free (assuming that there is a review for the test you want). However, keep in mind that MMY does not give you access to the actual instruments, only critical reviews of them. MMY provides coverage from Volume 9 (1985) to the present.

MMY has a neat Index button that lets you search by the test’s acronym or author. You can also search test categories and test names. Even if you aren’t on the quest for a particular instrument, explore MMY now before you are working under a deadline. Try it; you’ll like it!

Over and out,
… Rita B

Rita Barsun, Walden Librarian