define electronic bibliographic

• Walden University
• Faculty Portal

Reference List: Electronic Source References

Basics of citing electronic sources.

Most of the sources Walden students cite will be electronic because you primarily use an online library. Electronic source reference entries often have additional components (like electronic retrieval information):

Author. (Publication date). Title of document. Publishing information or electronic retrieval information.

See the subpages for detailed information about how to cite each kind of electronic source.

DOI, Other URL, or No Electronic Retrieval Information?

A DOI number, or a "digital object identifier," is a unique alphanumeric string that identifies content and provides a persistent link to its location on the internet. A DOI is a number that is specific to a certain piece and identifies it among other digital sources. Journal articles will commonly have a DOI associated with that specific article. Depending on where an article can be found, you may need to include a URL in place of a DOI. Guidelines for including a DOI or a URL can be found in the APA 7, Section 9.34. 

Here are the general guidelines:

• Include a DOI for all works that have a DOI, regardless if you use the online version or the print version.
• If a print work does not have a DOI, do not include any DOI or URL in the reference.
• If a work has both a DOI and a URL, include only the DOI.
• For works without DOIs from websites (not included in databases), provide a URL in the reference.
• For works without DOIs from academic databases, do not include a URL or database information in the reference because these works are widely available. The reference should be the same as the reference for a print version of the work.
• Other alphanumeric identifiers such as the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) are not included in APA style references.

Use this click-through flowchart to help you determine whether to use a DOI, another URL, or no electronic retrieval information for your journal article source.

Do you see a DOI on the article?

Often, publishers include the number in the header or footer of the article. It may appear in a slightly different format, starting with an http://dx.doi.org, https://doi.org, DOI:, or some other way of identifying the number as a DOI. Many DOI numbers start with 10.

Yes       No

Include the DOI number.

Include the DOI number at the end of your reference entry. The standard format is:

Park, S., Zo, H., Ciganek, A. P., & Lim, G. G. (2011). Examining success factors in the adoption of digital object identifier systems. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications , 10 (6), 626–636. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2011.05.004

Use the https://doi.org format consistently throughout your reference list. Use Microsoft Word's automatic hyperlink formatting (blue text, underlined, and active hyperlink). Also see our Quick Answer FAQ, "Can I use the DOI format provided by library databases?"

Do not end the reference list entry with a period as it might interfere with the hyperlink.

Take a look at more resources on reference list entries for articles with DOI numbers .

Check CrossRef.org for a DOI.

Check CrossRef.org's metadata search for the DOI. Search on CrossRef with the author(s), article title, and other publication information.

Did you find one?

Did you find the article in an academic database?

Most of your sources for scholarly research should come from publications you find in Walden University library's databases or through Google Scholar. Review the library's help page on evaluating resources to help you recognize what is a scholarly journal or not.

Leave out electronic retrieval information for the reference entry.

Your reference entry will look like one for a print version of a scholarly journal article. Here is an example:

Casler, T. (2020). Improving the graduate nursing experience through support on a social media platform. MEDSURG Nursing , 29 (2), 83–87.

Include the URL of the webpage where you found the article.

If your article is from a scholarly journal published on the open web, include the URL of the webpage where you found the article. Note that sources you find on the open web might belong to a number of different reference categories, so you should follow the format for those categories as applicable (such as for technical reports, white papers, or other forms of research that are part of gray literature—research produced and circulated outside of the peer-review process). Review the library's guidance on evaluating resources to make sure your sources are appropriate for your paper or study.

Here is an example of a journal article published on the open web:

Ford, T., Fix, M., Madsen, T., & Stroud, S. (2020). The eyes have it: A low-cost model for corneal foreign body removal training. Journal of Education and Teaching in Emergency Medicine , 5 (1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99z7d1xv

Formatting DOIs and URLs

• In APA 7, present both DOIs and URLs as hyperlinks (i.e., beginning with “https://” or “http://”).
• Use the default display settings in Microsoft Word for hyperlinks (blue font, underlined, and hyperlinked). It is also acceptable to present the DOI or URL in plain black text that is not underlined. Be consistent in how you format the hyperlinks throughout your reference list.
• Links should be live if the work is to be published or read online.
• As recommended by APA 7 and the International DOI Foundation, format your DOI as follows: https://doi.org/xxxx
• Do not add a period after the DOI or URL because it may interfere with link functionality
• Also see our Quick Answer FAQ, "Can I use the DOI format provided by library databases?"

Related Resources

Knowledge Check: Electronic Source References

Didn't find what you need? Email us at [email protected] .

• Previous Page: Multiple Sources With the Same Author and Year
• Next Page: Online Journal Articles
• Office of Student Disability Services

Walden Resources

Departments.

• Academic Residencies
• Academic Skills
• Career Planning and Development
• Customer Care Team
• Field Experience
• Military Services
• Student Success Advising
• Writing Skills

Centers and Offices

• Center for Social Change
• Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services
• Office of Degree Acceleration
• Office of Research and Doctoral Services
• Office of Student Affairs

Student Resources

• Doctoral Writing Assessment
• Form & Style Review
• Quick Answers
• ScholarWorks
• SKIL Courses and Workshops
• Walden Bookstore
• Walden Catalog & Student Handbook
• Student Safety/Title IX
• Legal & Consumer Information
• Website Terms and Conditions
• Cookie Policy
• Accessibility
• Accreditation
• State Authorization
• Net Price Calculator
• Contact Walden

Walden University is a member of Adtalem Global Education, Inc. www.adtalem.com Walden University is certified to operate by SCHEV © 2024 Walden University LLC. All rights reserved.

What is a Bibliographic Citation? Examples & Best Practices

• Posted on May 26, 2023

Whenever you dip your toes into the research world, one term you will likely encounter is “citation.” The term is familiar as every research work needs to contain a bibliography with a list of the sources consulted during the research process. You also have to ensure that the sources you include are appropriately cited. This is where bibliographic citation comes into the picture.

But what is a bibliographic citation? And how can you ensure that you follow the best practices when citing your sources? Read on to explore the definition, examples, and best practices of bibliographic citations.

What is a Bibliographic Citation?

A bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item that provides the necessary information for readers to locate and retrieve that source. It includes the following information:

• Author’s last name
• Date of publication
• Page numbers of your sources
• Online sources

When writing a research paper, it is important to cite sources and paraphrase to avoid plagiarism . There are different source types that require other citation formats, such as journal articles, magazine articles, online articles, electronic sources, conference proceedings, and book reviews.

You should include the author’s last name and the publication year in parentheses for in-text citations. If you cite multiple sources, list them alphabetically by the author’s last name.

For reference entries, the format will vary depending on the source type. For example, a journal article citation should include the author’s last name and initials, the publication year, the article title, the journal title, the volume number, and the page numbers. 

An online source citation should include the author’s last name and initials, the publication date, the article title, the website name, the URL or HTML, and the date you accessed the source.

During citation, it is essential to provide detailed information for each source you cite to help readers locate the source. You should also ensure your research paper is accurate and credible for easy organizing.

When writing quoted information, knowing the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing is vital. If you use direct wording without changing them, it could lead to high plagiarism scores. 

What is an Annotated Bibliography?

An annotated bibliography is a collection of specific notes on a source. The bibliographies include two parts: the citation and the annotation. The citation provides basic information about the source, such as the author’s name(s), publication date, title of work, and publisher. 

At the same time, annotations are brief summaries or evaluations describing how valuable each information source was for your research project.

For an annotated bibliography, in-text citations should be included within parentheses after any direct quote or paraphrase from another author’s work (basic format). 

You can also create a reference list with all works cited at the end of the paper. It is essential to list the citations alphabetically by last name and first initial followed by year publication information enclosed in parentheses (Publication Manual).

• Last Name, First Initial. (Year Published). Title of Book/Article/Journal/Magazine/Newspaper/etc., Publisher/City Where Published.
• Doe JF Jr., Smith AB III. (2019) Marketing strategies for small businesses: A case study approach. Wiley & Sons Inc, New York City.

Bibliographies can be an incredibly helpful tool when conducting research or writing papers. They provide detailed information about sources used in your work, which can ensure you’re citing all relevant materials correctly.

What are Endnotes?

Endnotes citation provide additional information or clarification on a specific point within the text. You can place them at the end of a page, so readers can easily locate them without disrupting the writing’s continuity. 

Unlike in-text citations, which use parentheses and can be found directly after the quoted or paraphrased material, endnotes utilize superscript numbers that correspond with their respective entries in an organized reference list at the conclusion of your thesis. 

To properly format an endnote, include essential details such as the author’s name, publication date, title, and publisher, separated by commas.

3 Examples of Bibliographic Citations

There are different formats for bibliographic citations, depending on the source type. Here are three examples of bibliographic citations:

1. Book Citation

Here is an American Psychological Association (APA) style book citation:

• Author Last Name, Author First Name. (Publication Year) Title. Publisher’s City: Publisher. Page numbers

In this citation, the author’s last name comes first, followed by their first name. The publication year is enclosed in parentheses, followed by the book’s title, the publisher’s city, the publisher, and the page numbers. 

For example, Smith, John. (2010) The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner. 167-250.2. Journal article citation

It is essential to consider if the book has more than one writer, as this can change the formatting of the above citation. For instance, you have to write all the writers’ names in the same format, Last Name, First Name.

2. Journal Article Citation

Here is an APA-style journal article citation:

• Author Last Name, Author First Name. (Publication Date—could be more than a year) “Article Title.”Publication Title, Vol. #. (Issue #), Page numbers

When citing a journal article, you should include the author’s last name and first name, the publication date, the article title, the publication title, the volume and issue numbers, and the page numbers. You can also input a doi if the publisher provides one.

For example, Johnson, Emily. (2018) “The Effects of Social Media on Mental Health.” Psychology Today, 35(4), 12-23.

3. Website Citation

Here is an American Psychological Association (APA-style) journal article citation:

• Author. (Date of Internet Publication—could be more than a year) “Document Title.” Title of Publication. Retrieved on: Date from Full Web Address, starting with http://

A website citation should include the author’s name, date of internet publication, document title, title of publication, and the full web address. 

For example, Smith, Mark. (2020) “The Benefits of Meditation.” Healthline. Retrieved on August 15, 2021, from https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/12-benefits-of-meditation . Note that the data retrieved should correspond with the precise date you visited the website for research.

You can also use different bibliographic citations to cite the same information. Be keen on the changes, as they can be slightly confusing. 

Best Practices for Bibliographic Citations

Incorporating bibliographic citations effectively is crucial in any research paper or article. Follow these best practices to ensure accuracy and consistency:

• Choose the appropriate citation style based on your field (e.g., humanities, social sciences).
• Use quotation marks for direct quotes and italics for titles of longer works.
• Include parenthetical citations with relevant information, such as the author’s last name, publication date, and page number.
• List all sources alphabetically by the author’s last name on a separate reference page.
• Avoid unnecessary abbreviations and maintain consistent formatting throughout your work.

To better understand the citation rules, it is ideal to understand the different exemplary bibliographic citations such as American Psychological Association (APA 7th edition), Chicago, or Modern Language Association (MLA 8th edition). The styles have specific formatting requirements for different types of sources of information like articles and web pages.

For more guidance on citing different sources , refer to this comprehensive citation guide on how to use citations with various styles like APA, MLA style, and the Chicago Manual of Style:

Every research individual can ask, “What is a bibliographic citation?” Bibliographic citations are an essential part of any research paper or publication. They provide detailed information about the sources used in the work and allow readers to locate and verify the information cited. 

Annotated bibliographies and endnotes are also valuable tools for organizing and presenting sources. It is essential to follow best practices, including all necessary information, formatting correctly, and citing multiple sources properly, to ensure your work is credible and reliable. 

If you need assistance with creating accurate bibliographic citations or other aspects of your marketing materials or publications, visit our website today !

Sign Up for Quetext Today!

Click below to find a pricing plan that fits your needs.

You May Also Like

Mastering the Basics: Understanding the 4 Types of Sentences

• Posted on April 5, 2024

Can You Go to Jail for Plagiarism?

• Posted on March 22, 2024 March 22, 2024

Empowering Educators: How AI Detection Enhances Teachers’ Workload

• Posted on March 14, 2024

The Ethical Dimension | Navigating the Challenges of AI Detection in Education

• Posted on March 8, 2024

How to Write a Thesis Statement & Essay Outline

• Posted on February 29, 2024 February 29, 2024

The Crucial Role of Grammar and Spell Check in Student Assignments

• Posted on February 23, 2024 February 23, 2024

Revolutionizing Education: The Role of AI Detection in Academic Integrity

• Posted on February 15, 2024

How Reliable are AI Content Detectors? Which is Most Reliable?

• Posted on February 8, 2024 February 8, 2024

Input your search keywords and press Enter.

Electronic Literature Directory

Article a bibliographic overview of electronic literature.

Electronic literature is born-digital literary art that exploits, as its muse and medium, the transmedia possibilities of the digital. It is, according to the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” [1]

The rapid emergence of this field necessitates a smartly curated beginners’ guide. This essay seeks to provide such by reviewing recent works that we feel represent an effective overview of current electronic literature (e-lit) scholarship. Sketching a durable architecture of critical contemporary e-lit texts is no easy task as both the pasts and the futures of the field are in dynamic shift and flow. In the service of putting forth a practical bibliography of e-lit scholarship, we here foreground the historical lineages (its disputed pasts) to focus primarily on the contemporary questions, conversations, critiques and critical theories that point toward its potential futures.

Important to the ongoing development of the field are pedagogical interventions. E-lit provides students new objects to think with and new ways to think the objects (the text ) we think we know. Electronic literatures have rearranged the literary and reconfigured textual potentialities. Weaved within the reviews below are annotated cues suggesting possible nodes (and interfaces) for its classroom integration.

The field of electronic literature is international, interdisciplinary, and animatedly emergent. The artists and theorists converging on the field come from different traditions―from literature and media studies to computer/information science and art history―each bringing the assumptions, approaches, methodologies, and mobilizing questions particular to her home discipline. This variety and multiplicity, highlighted in the texts below, make it an exciting field for scholars and students.

E-lit Overview

The four books comprising the Medienumbrüche│Media Upheavals (2007-2010) electronic literature series ( Aesthetics of Net Literature , Literary Art in Digital Performance , Reading Moving Letters , and Beyond the Screen ), were chosen here as the backbone of our curricular structure as they provide a representative overview of current scholarship (specifically, a survey of current print scholarship available in English). Each of the collections puts diverse perspective―those representing the literary, the artistic, the technological, and the performative―into conversation by finding shared points of contact and common nodes of intersection. This series calculatedly moves in a legible succession―from positing in the first edition that literary processes “emerge from techno-social networks” to presenting case studies, close readings and aesthetic approaches in books two and three to finally moving beyond the screen in the fourth. For the novice scholar or student, this continuity allows one to fluidly move likewise through the existing e-lit canon from entrance, to engagement, to exploratory experimentation.

In the first of the books, The Aesthetics of Net Literature (2007), editors Peter Gendolla & Jörgen Schäfer establish the collection’s working assumption: new forms of literature have arisen “as a result of the programmed manipulations of signs and the networking of computers and their users”(9). The sixteen essays here work toward an aesthetic of electronic literature by contemplating the question of the new literary quality that emerges when a work is born digital (i.e. created as digital media) in the midst of programmed signs and networked users. Each participating author contributes an approach or a provocation that interrogates this issue.

Proposing a programmatic framework for an e-lit aesthetic is Philippe Bootz who, in his essay “The Problem of Form” suggests we read literary forms as programming processes and programming processes as literary (poetic) material. Bootz offers a procedure for studying a digital literary work that separately examines the levels of a work―its surface level, communicative level, and meta-level―that together provide an entry point for understanding its meaning, its creative (and creating) aesthetic, and the relations it enacts between writer, reader, and sign. Similarly, Loss P Glazier in “Code, Cod, Ode” asks us to deliberately consider the poetic language in and of programming code when we read e-lit as it is the code and the “onscreen event of the code’s execution” that manifest the possibilities of the digital poetic work (328).

Posing a more pragmatic approach is Roberto Simanowski in “Holopoetry, Biopoetry, and Digital Literature.” He challenges us to “shift from linguistic hermeneutics to a hermeneutics of intermedial, interactive, and performative signs” by focusing on “the digital in digital literature” (47-48). He smartly gestures toward the misappropriation of ‘electronic’ as an organizational modifier in so far as it limits our theoretical boundaries if used as a strict qualifier. By dismissing the premise that electronic literature is literature electrified, he points toward a method of analysis that rejects the separation of the electronic medium from the work’s literariness and instead appreciates that the literary is indeed inseparable from the mediated, performative (inter)face of the unified work.

Gendolla & Schäfer’s approach is to likewise reframe the terminological distinction so as to reframe the stage of the debate. In “Playing with Signs,” they ask us to rethink electronic literature as Net Literature arguing that literature, as “a specific organ of perception, as a ‘high-voltage’ sixth sense for socio-cultural change,” has been both actively and passively participating in the technocontemporary upheavals brought about by modern networked technologies (17; see also, Simanowski, Digital Art and Meaning, discussed below). This intermingled interdependency with and within the network and networked media necessitates, for them, that we think of our e-lit works as net literature . Here as with Simanowski, what is at stake in the terminological is the ideological; our terms reflect and define the discourse of our ideologies.

The next collection, Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism (2009) features formidable case studies from American and European philosophers, artists, and media theorists that address the question “What might constitute a paradigmatic method for analyzing digital artworks?” (7). Representing the demographic and disciplinary diversity of their authors, the studies offer manifold modes for analytical critique. The various points of disciplinary cont(r)act converge here on the thesis that “the examined work’s mechanism illustrates the uniqueness of its production across invocations, lending to it behavior that is both idiosyncratic (reinforcing its internal sense of difference), yet sufficiently cohesive to accentuate the voice and character of identity (reinforcing its internal sense of continuity)...” (6-7).

In his introduction, Francisco Ricardo points toward two distinct theoretical framing formulas represented in this collection―the synthetic/formalistic on the one hand and the critical/historical on the other. Manifesting the latter, Simanowski proposes an e-lit reading model that begins from the premise that “the first purpose that a digital work serves is as an act of creative expression” (17). He believes a digital work is “fundamentally different from and more complex than a material or printed work” and that it “deserves a broad, extratextual reading of its creative context” à la New Criticism that effects a close reading extending beyond the text and its screen(s) (17).

Performing the synthetic/formalistic analysis, N. Katherine Hayles presents a method (metaphor) she calls intermediation that extends not just the act of critique but also the space of meaning (see also, Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer). Intermediation, provocatively―but elegantly―developed from Hayles’s unique position as a practiced chemist and a practicing literary critic, “recognizes nonhuman as well as human possibilities for meaning-making” (49). This perspective sees literary texts as objects in “a continuous flux of interconnections, networks, processes” within a world that is not only in motion , but is motion (50).

Further essays here include work on ‘geopoetics’ from Katja Kwastek, on digital poetics from John Cayley and Chris Funkhouser, and on Second Life and interactive drama from Maria Backe and Schäfer. Each of the case studies puts into motion the various approaches suggested in the first collection, The Aesthetics of Net Lit , creating a valuable topography for evaluating the viability and productivity of the differing methods. Instructors and students alike will find similarities within the differences and difference within the similarities leading toward an enriching dialogue.

Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching, a Handbook (2010) includes critical essays and pedagogical observations from e-lit instructors and practitioners in the United States, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Slovenia by authors representing an array of academic backgrounds. Reading Moving Letters began as a project to address the educational and pedagogical questions of teaching and incorporating e-lit instruction into the university curriculum and does so by focusing distinctly on both: methods of reading e-lit are discussed in Part I and models of teaching―along with specific course reports from current e-lit instructors―are given in Part II.

Characterizing the literary as “the arranging of the material or the use of features in an uncommon fashion to undermine any automatic perception for the purpose of aesthetic perception,” Simanowski, in the introductory essay “Reading Digital Literature,” establishes the question of this collection as one asking “What are the [literary] strategies of figuration and estrangement when literature is digitally born?” (16).

Reflecting again the theme of position-al multiplicity, this collection reveals two primary methodologies, each with a particular, but not necessarily contradictory or exclusionary, ethos. The first believes it necessary to ground theory in stable, and thus disciplined, theoretico-historical foundations. The second believes it necessary to move beyond the idea of disciplined disciplines to create a distinctly interdisciplinary space for new/hybrid terms and scholarship. The choice of one over the other carries important implications that can alternately and/or simultaneously mobilize and/or debilitate (and/or also destabilize) our objects and our critical positions.

If we are too tightly or too tidily contained within a particular theoretical discourse, we chance ignoring significant or critical elements of what should be a hybrid episteme for the study and teaching of e-lit. Alternately, if we are too open― too hybrid―we risk a-historicizing or de-historicizing our works and practice. The boundaries and balances are delicate and must be taught alongside the objects and their theories. As with the previous collections, the juxtaposition here of disagreeing perspectives opens the space for a conversation about the highlights and inherent vices of each.

Gendolla & Schäfer, in “Reading (in) the Net,” speak to the importance of a careful hybridity by cautioning against oversimplified contextualizations that may mislead or dis-serve us: “What, on the surface, seem to be resemblances or analogies [analogs?] of new media art to the modernist tradition, are symptoms of a radical change in media technologies whose mid- to long-term consequences we are only beginning to realize” (82, brackets mine). They present four epistemological categories that, in their reassessment vis-à-vis e-lit works, may form the foundation for a net literature aesthetic: 1) intentionality versus chance; 2) performativity/performance; 3) emergence; 4) game/play (94). They believe these four create the “aesthetic criteria [of] literary human-machine communication in networked media” as they seek to speak for both the literariness and the “unique aesthetic difference ” we find in e-lit works (92).

In “Five Elements of Digital Literature,” Noah Wardrip-Fruin agrees that in order to properly read digital literature, we must avoid shallow categorizations. He says “we need to be specific about system behavior and user experience―and explicitly aware that data’s impact on experience is at least as great as process and interaction” (40). Wardrip-Fruin suggests we reach an organized categorization scheme by way of testing various possible methods (he suggests 4) to determine which would best suit our pursuit. Wardrip-Fruin deliberately privileges an e-lit work’s processes believing that paying them closer attention is not only necessary but also enriching for the study of e-lit.

The first way (way 1), in what sounds like a not-so-distant alliance with Marie-Laure Ryan’s early impulse in Cyberspace Textuality (1999) to categorize digital literatures via the action of the computer, distinguishes works that use computation only in the authoring stages from works that use computation at both the authoring and reading stages. This path feels flawed in its much too narrow classification schema and is rather deceptive in its seeming simplicity as many works are not so easily grouped based on the concept of their functions and functionings. Wardrip-Fruin alternately suggests we could distinguish e-lit works according to their internal potential for variation (way 2) or according to their input flows (way 3) or according to their human interaction levels (way 4). Each way has obvious and invisible costs and benefits. A testing of types, as he suggests, is a good starting point for revealing both to the early student or scholar.

Wardrip-Fruin presents five key elements to consider when reading digital literature and when testing various e-lit reading paradigms: data, processes, interaction, surface, and context. Though helpful to parse the various parts of the e-lit work as Wardrip-Fruin here does, we must be careful not to fall too easily into his part-ializing scheme. A work of art is all of its parts and when we attempt to study each in its isolation we risk losing the whole in the midst of its dissection.

Speaking to this, John Zuern in “Figures in the Interface” writes “…if we want to develop a procedure for the close reading of digital literary texts, we must endeavor to show how identifiable qualities of the medium in which a text is produced, displayed, and disseminated intersect constitutively with identifiable strategies of figuration that make the text recognizable as “literature”...the strictures of such an approach would demand that we ask ourselves, in each instance of close reading, whether computation as such is essential to the specifically literary properties of the text or essential only to the existence of the text as a particular kind of artifact”(60). Zuern believes it is the ambiguous distinction between the literary and the artifactual that blurs the emerging critical discourse. Though Zuern sees this ambiguity as symptomatic, it can indeed be productively mobilized in our research and instruction. By interrogating the ambiguities, we may discover the abiding particularities.

Two other essays of note in this collection are Raine Koskimaa’s article on “Approaches to Digital Literature” and Astrid Ensslin’s “From Revisi(tati)on to Retro-Intentionalization.” Koskimaa presents the idea of the cyborg author and gives a theoretical treatment of the temporality of literary cybertexts (129). Ensslin introduces an approach she calls “cybersomatic criticism” which focuses on the role of the body and the body’s embodied mechanisms during the e-lit reading process. Ensslin’s approach is one combining the phenomenological with the biological as they are implicated in the reading process.

The first article in the final collection, Beyond the Screen, Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces, and Genres (2010), Schäfer’s “Reassembling the Literary” asks the question “In what way [does] the literary―that has been analyzed as a phenomenon of a quite specific experience of difference for literature in book culture―continue to be valid for literary processes in computer based media?” (27). In answering this question, he proposes we also ask another: How do we move beyond the question of the literary to include interdisciplinary approaches, like those of semiotics, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, performance/actor theories, in our search for a theory of e-lit works? He challenges us to make new associations between and betwixt the various knowledges unique to particular disciplines.

In “Memory and Motion,” Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs take up the materiality of new media writing and its environments and interrogate what is at stake as we move away from alphabetic modes of communication toward those “based on emergent technologies of the image, motion capture, and gesture” (123). They believe “with electronic writing the word returns somewhat to performed (social) event (but also to the magic and ritual associated with animism), rather than the inanimate typographic images associated with forms of privatized (book) reading” (129).

In “The Gravity of the Leaf,” Cayley argues that new media literary forms simply make visible the always present problematic between language, especially language art, and its media. He explains: “Because language has been constrained to the mind, the voice and laterally to the “surface of the leaf,” we have internalized its being-in-all-possible-worlds as such. When it appears in “new media” we are re-sensitized to the experience of its never-having-belonged-here” (200). In exploring the worlds of and created by new media literary objects, he focuses on the writing space of the four-walled interactive-projective Cave (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). When we experience reading―or language―within the Cave, he says “we are brought face to-literally, spectral (sur)-face with the strange relationship between language and media, between language and its embodiment in the worlds that media provide” (216).

Wardrip-Fruin here too, in “Beyond the Complex Surface,” refers to the space of the Cave as it manifests itself to/for the artist. “As artists select and craft complex surfaces for their works,” he says, “expectations can be created more flexibly and perhaps more powerfully than when working with default configurations (whether personal computer screens or codex books)” (246).

This collection goes then beyond the screen(s) considering a wide range of interfaces and iterations: Hayles takes up RFID codes; Dene Grigar discusses hyperlinks in three-dimensional performances spaces; Ricardo, Jeremy Hight, and Jean-Pierre Balpe explore locative media; Jochen Venus focuses on video games. Also taken up in this collection are the important questions of archiving, presentation (editing & curation), and preservation [2]. As the fourth in the series, it is a laudable exhibit of the state of current e-lit scholarship.

The scaffold of a curriculum for beginning students, scholars, and instructors of e-lit would be incomplete without the addition of N. Katherine Hayles’s Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008). This slender book stands (strongly still) as an authority for electronic literature [3]. Electronic Literature lays out the most important current (at time of publication) questions, definitions, concepts, contexts in a fluid language that makes the scholarship accessible to both beginners and experts. Hayles points to the important historical precursors as well as to the contexts, contents, and codes underpinning electronic literary works. Hayles’s previous books, for instance My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Writing Machines (2002), and How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), are also important critical texts [4].

E-lit online spaces

E-lit online sites provide dynamic conversation for students and scholars. A notable few among the many are the ELO ( www.eliterature.org ), the Electronic Book Review ( www.electronicbookreview.com ), the ELMCIP Knowledgebase ( www.elmcip.net/knowledgebase ), Netpoetic ( www.netpoetic.com ), HTLit ( www.htlit.com ), the multilingual This Week in E-Lit ( www.paper.li/eliterature ), Dichtung Digital ( http://dichtung-digital.mewi.unibas.ch/index.htm ), Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures ( www.hyperrhiz.net/home ), The New River journal of digital writing and art ( www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/11Fall/index.html ), the new media poetry journal, Poems That Go ( www.poemsthatgo.com ), hypermedia journal Beehive ( www.beehive.temporalimage.com ), The Iowa Review Web ( www.iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/vol9n1/ ) and the Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu).

For curated collections of electronic literary works see the ELO's Electronic Literature Directory (directory.eliterature.org) as well as their two DVD collections Electronic Literature Collection, v1 & v2 (collection.eliterature.org) and the Electronic Literature Exhibit at MLA 2012 (dtc-wsuv.org/mla2012/index.html).

E-lit Subfields

Several of the main so-classified subfields within electronic literature have become popular routes of study for e-lit scholars and students. A sufficient overview of the subfields will include, at least, hypertext fiction, digital poetry, interactive fiction, and a brief foray into literary digital art.

Contemporary digital hypertext fiction was perhaps first successfully practiced and positioned by Michael Joyce, author of the classic hypertext fiction, afternoon: a story . In Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics (1995) and Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture (2000) Joyce speaks to the critical situation of hypertext fiction and the “newly evolving consciousness and cognition” that are co-developing as we integrate the virtual with the real and affirm the various embodiments of our digital selves. A more recent analysis of hypertext fiction can be found in Alice Bell’s The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (2010). Bell proposes a theory and method for the critical positioning of hypertext fiction and does what the New Critics might understand as a techno-postmodern iteration of close reading of four foundational hypertext fictions. Like Simanowksi and others here reviewed, Bell challenges us―as readers, theorists, and educators―to conduct systematic and analytical criticism of electronic literary works.

For a review of interactive fiction (IF), fiction that reacts meaningfully to input, see Nick Montfort’s book Twisty Little Passages (2003) and his more recent articles and webposts on his website http://nickm.com/if/ . His work Adventure in Style , using his newly created Curveship IF software, typifies this category; in it, the “players type short natural language commands, the result of each action is simulated, and the new situation is described in text.” Montfort tells us that “Interactive fiction aspires to have human-like dialogue in natural language, not command-line interaction” [5].

Much has been done on the subfield of digital poetry which itself has been divided into subcategories. From Glazier’s Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (2001) to Adelaide Morris’s edited volume New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (2006) to Chris Funkhouser’s two works Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995 (2007) and the just published New Directions in Digital Poetry (2012) the scholarship here is considerable and accessible.

The goal of Morris’s collection is to add e-poetry to the discourse of e-lit while delineating it from other formulations/genres of electronic literary works. The essays here situate e-poetry within the vernacular of digital literary/visual art works as well as highlight its lineage within the grand traditions of poetry and experimental poetics. The book’s articles address the three categories of its subtitle―the Contexts surrounding e-poetries, a selection of representative Technotexts exemplifying its possible iterations, and the various Theories emerging in e-poetry―providing a ready architecture for its study and/or its integration into poetic or literary curricula.

E-poetry can be convincingly found within and without its literary heritage: Morris and Jay Bolter, in this collection, for instance, trace the beginnings of e-poetries to the avant-garde works of Mallarme, Apollinaire, and the Dada artists while others find the new of new media poetries to be inherently located in the depths of the poem’s coded layers. In this collection, Glazier, Talan Memmott, and Cayley focus on the coding and programming aspects (grammars?) of e-poetries thus aligning the works more with what might be a born-digital generation of poetry that owes a legacy to―but jumps rather far beyond―their traditional poetic ancestors.

Pushing further outward from this latter position, Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media (2002) seems, provocatively and perhaps rather harshly, to sever the literary from the work by effectively mathematimacizing e-poetries―and e-literatures―suggesting they have more an algorithmic, numerical constitution than one based on formal language. “All new media objects,” he writes, “whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations” (27).

Funkhouser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry is a self-described ‘archaeological’ investigation of the socio-historical and the artistic-structural routes/roots of digital poetry. Like Morris, he interrogates the newness of digital poetry and, as many do, he situates digital poetries as the progeny of the avant-garde and experimental traditions. In order to trace his archaeology, he works under a rather broad―and perhaps unsatisfying―definition of digital poetry: “A poem is a digital poem if computer programming or process (software) are distinctively used in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text (or combination of texts)” (22). This rather Foucauldian turn toward an archaeological framework offers an interesting - and interestingly nuanced - posture to the study of e-lit. Though not attractive to every scholar, this scheme, which represents a coherent plane of reference through which one can examine e-lit objects, can be mobilized as a prototype for a differently-shaped ordering of things. The content here is valuable and smart, and covers topics like text generation, visual works, digital code, and mediation, that may be of interest to students. Though primarily about digital poetry, much of his work here is apt and readily transferable to the greater discussion of electronic literatures.

In his most recent work, Funkhouser moves beyond the archaeological framework to reintegrate digital poetry into the body of the artist and the world of the art. "As with the experience of traversing an arcade [where "the crowd, in addition to the architecture, became the spectacle"] meandering through the structure of digital poetry brings us to the realization that the environment is as fluid and crucial to the reflective experience as is the visible content itself.” He feels “the appearance of new kinds of dynamic web-based media, of installations, and of other kinds of 'arcades' through which the poetic work can be acquired” necessitates an updated ‘expedition’ (ix).

Funkhouser's approach in this new work pays more attention to the process-level structures and organizational formula inherent in each individual poem than to the overall workings of the medium itself. He is a literary scholar before a media scholar―if the two can be so easily split―and though he recognizes the importance of the mediated device, his close readings tend to concentrate on the poem's particular mode of becoming as opposed to its medium of being. He wants to show that a digital poem "functions as something other than poetry presented on a computer" and is something other than an electrified print-poem (1). He does this by revealing the processes behind (and beyond and below) the interface behaviors and display.

Simanowski’s Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art and Interactive Installations (2011) collectively covers several of the ‘genres’ of electronic literature as digital art works. Simanowski denounces the typical contemporary approach to digital aesthetics―an approach that embraces the audience and refuses the critic―in order to reframe the argument and re- embrace the role of the critic. He calls for a reemergence of the critical gaze: “With the increasing importance of digital media in all areas of social and cultural life, it is necessary to define a conceptual framework for understanding the social changes produced by digital media and to show students and readers how to interact critically with digital media culture” (1). Simanowski argues for a hermeneutic approach to e-lit close reading that is grounded in a traditional discourse that adapts classical terminologies and adopts new ones. We must also then develop a semantics (and a pragmatics, semiotics, and ethic) of the link, of code, and of the digital image and reconsider how traditional concepts, like those of the body, of presence, and of performance, are complicated by the digital.

In the development of a digital aesthetic, Simanowski warns, as he does in his contributions to the collections reviewed above, against developing ‘preoccupations’ that mistakenly privilege one or another of the component parts that together define the hermeneutic: he rejects “the embrace of code as such at the expense of its actual materialization, the embrace of the body’s action at the expense of its cognitive reflection, and the embrace of the pure presence of the artwork as the expense of any examination in semiotic meaning” (xi). But, it is important to note that he does not in any way deny any of these outright; the code, the body, and the presence, though none alone is sufficient for a digital aesthetic, a digital aesthetic cannot exist without their critical consideration. His position calls for both a self-contained close reading and a simultaneous consideration of the external aspects of the work’s production, context, and implication. He says, “code matters as much as its materialization in text, sound, visual object, and process matters in the experience of the work by its audience…bodily experience within an interactive work is a more or less intentional result of such creative expression and that it thus requires interpretation on the part of the spectator or interactor” (x).

The goal of his work here is to introduce literary close reading skills to media studies and media studies questions to literary aesthetics. “Offering skills to students and critical readers rather than offering them knowledge” he writes, “teaches them how to produce their own knowledge” ―and, we would add, to produce their own digital literary art works (xi).

E-lit authority Hayles agrees and recommends that in the classroom we pair the teaching of e-lit reading skills with the concurrent instruction of e-lit creation. By creating their own works in an environment that closely re-produces the conditions of its typical authoring―one that is collaborative, transliterary, active, layered, programmed and coded―our students can gain deeper understandings of the field and its objects. Students produce concepts from the works and from the working―the hands-on making―of e-lit pieces.

E-lit Satellites

Though we are focused here on contemporary work that reflects the current state of electronic literature study, it is worthwhile to point a new reader of e-lit to its peripheral forking relations.

Critical Terms for Media Study (2010) edited by Mark B.N. Hansen and W.J.T Mitchell is an excellent resource for e-lit scholars as it takes the objects and ideas we study―e.g. art, the body, materiality, language, information, technology, networks, time + space―and places each within the context of media while simultaneously situating media within the context of these concepts. Instead of using a particular media field (like film, for instance) as the framework for studying the concepts, this collection reverses the project and uses the concepts to interrogate the medium/media of its expression. Instead of a book about a particular medium, this is a book about the concepts and how they are problematized or manifested within media-ted expression. This sort of project could be productively mimicked in the classroom and indeed this book is used as an organizing text for new media courses.

The collection provides contexts and subtexts, as well as dynamic intertextual conversation, about new media study from some of the most relevant and important theorists working in the field. There are essays in Critical Terms by Joanna Drucker (on Art), Bill Brown (on Materiality), Mitchell (on Image), Bernard Stiegler (on Memory), Hayles (on Cybernetics), Hansen (on New Media), Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (on Hard-/Soft-/Wet-ware), and David Wellbery (on Systems). Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media (2006) is likewise useful in situating electronic literary works in a philosophical milieu.

For a foundational overview (qua genealogy) of new media study, see the New Media Reader edited by Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin. This collection has become the go-to textbook for many university courses on digital media. From Espen Aarseth to Donna Haraway to Manovich to Sherry Turkle, the essays here trace the history of the field and its varied precursors. The articles represent works and ideas by the designers, scholars, artists, computer scientists, information specialists, novelists, and critical theorists from 1941 to 1994 who have helped shape contemporary new media e-lit discourse.

E-lit Reading

A final note on research and pedagogy is inspired by Wardrip-Fruin who, in Reading Moving Letters writes “I believe there remains more I need to learn to read, in order to read digital literature” (41). We must teach our students, and ourselves, not only to read digital literature critically but also to read literature digitally . Hayles points out that our students are primed to read digital text in a surface, skimming mode derived from―and certainly in line with―the type of non-literary, mostly-communicative daily web reading that typifies their (our) relation to the cyber-text. It is important that we learn―and teach―new ways of reading that break (into) these habits and facilitate digital literary reading skills that appreciate the literary systems and structures created when literatures become modernly transmediated [5].

[Editor's Note: This text was initially written to be published in Russian in the Novoye Literaturnoye Obozrenie ( New Literary Observer ) journal. See http://www.nlobooks.ru/.]

1. Quotation from ( http://eliterature.org/about/ ). Within the field of scholarship, though we examine the same objects, there are those who prefer different definitions and terminologies for what we here call electronic literature. Some argue, for instance, the terms digital literature or network literature (net lit) or cyber-literature (cyber-lit) should be used instead. In the spirit of honoring the ELO, we here use electronic literature to designate our objects and our study.

2. Digital curation is becoming a growing concern for e-lit scholars and creators. For more on curating digital works, from digital video to software to networked systems see Joasia Krysa’s edited collection, Curating Immateriality: The work of the curator in the age of network systems (2006). From theory to examples, this provides both an introduction and a walk through curatorial practices in the contemporary techno-literary climate. Articles of most interest: Joasia Krysa’s introduction; Geoff Cox’s article on curating code and software systems; Christiane Paul’s and Jacob Lillemose’s articles on curating Internet art; and Trebor Scholz article on curation and online participation.

3. Hayles’s Electronic Literature was comprehensively reviewed by Mark Marino in Digital Humanities Quarterly in Summer 2008 and has a companion website at newhorizons.eliterature.org/.

4. Hayles’s forthcoming How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis , (University of Chicago Press, May, 2012) will add yet another text to our study.

5. "Curveship's Automatic Narrative Style," Foundations of Digital Games, Bordeaux, 1 July 2011 ( http://nickm.com/if/montfort_fdg_2011.pdf ).

6. Hayles gives an example: when she teaches Jackson’s e-lit work Patchwork Girl in her literature course, she urges students to break their web-skimming habit by assigning that they spend as much time reading this as they would spend reading Shelley’s Frankenstein . (Example gathered from private communication with Hayles).

Print Resources

Bell, A. (2010). The possible worlds of hypertext fiction. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bolter, J. D. (1999). Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Ciccoricco, D. (2007). Reading network fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Funkhouser, C. (2007). Prehistoric digital poetry: an archaeology of forms, 1959-1995. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Funkhouser, C. (2012). New directions in digital poetry. New York ; London: Continuum. Gendolla, P and J Schäfer, eds. (2010). Beyond the screen: transformations of literary structures, interfaces and genres. Bielefeld; New Brunswick, NJ: Transcript; Distributed in North America by Transaction Publishers. Gendolla, P and J Schäfer, eds. (2007). The aesthetics of net literature: writing, reading and playing in the programmable media. Bielefeld; Piscataway, NJ: Transcript; Transaction Publishers. Glazier, L. P. (2002). Digital poetics : the making of e-poetries. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press. Hansen, M. B. N. and W.J.T. Mitchell, eds. (2010). Critical terms for media studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hansen, M. B. N. (2004). New philosophy for new media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2002). Writing machines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hayles, N. K. (2005). My mother was a computer : digital subjects and literary texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2008). Electronic literature: new horizons for the literary. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame. Halyes, N. K. (2012). How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joyce, M. (1995). Of two minds : hypertext pedagogy and poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Joyce, M. (2000). Othermindedness : the emergence of network culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Krysa, ed. (2006). Curating immateriality: the work of the curator in the age of network systems. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Landow, G. P. (2006). Hypertext 3.0 : critical theory and new media in an era of globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Morris, A, ed. (2006). New media poetics: contexts, technotexts, and theories. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Ricardo, F, ed. (2009). Literary art in digital performance: case studies in new media art and criticism. New York: Continuum. Ryan, M.-L. (1999). Cyberspace textuality: computer technology and literary theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (2006). Avatars of story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simanowski, R, J Schäfer and P Gendolla, eds. (2010). Reading moving letters: digital literature in research and teaching : a handbook. Bielefeld; Piscataway, NJ: Transcript Verlag; Distributed in North America by Transaction Pub. Simanowski, R. (2011). Digital art and meaning: reading kinetic poetry, text machines, mapping art, and interactive installations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Online Resources

Beehive at beehive.temporalimage.com/ Electronic Book Review at www.electronicbookreview.com/ Electronic Literature Exhibit at MLA 2012 dtc-wsuv.org/mla2012/index.html Electronic Literature Organization at eliterature.org/ ELMCIP Knowledge Base at elmcip.net/knowledgebase Electronic Poetry Center at epc.buffalo.edu/ Dichtung Digital at dichtung-digital.mewi.unibas.ch/ HTLit at htlit.com/ Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures at hyperrhiz.net/home The Iowa Review Web at iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/vol9n1/ Netpoetic at netpoetic.com New River journal of digital writing and art at cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/11Fall/index.html Poems That Go at poemsthatgo.com/ This Week in E-Lit at paper.li/eliterature

The UK Faculty of Public Health has recently taken ownership of the Health Knowledge resource. This new, advert-free website is still under development and there may be some issues accessing content. Additionally, the content has not been audited or verified by the Faculty of Public Health as part of an ongoing quality assurance process and as such certain material included maybe out of date. If you have any concerns regarding content you should seek to independently verify this.

Electronic bibliographical databases and their limitations

PLEASE NOTE:

We are currently in the process of updating this chapter and we appreciate your patience whilst this is being completed.

In the age of evidence-based medicine, being able to search for relevant research to answer a question is crucial to both scientists and clinicians. At the same time, computers and the internet have revolutionised medical publishing. With thousands of research articles being published each year, bibliographic databases provide a way to search the archives of multiple journals from across the world.

A bibliographic database is a repository of bibliographic or publication records. It provides an index of journal articles from multiple journals, and includes citations, abstracts and often a link to the full text. Databases are available online, so they can be updated regularly and easily accessed.  

The Medline database

Medline is perhaps the best known bibliographic database, and can be accessed free of charge via several online portals including PubMed. It is compiled by the National Library of Medicine of the United States and in 1997 was thought to have included around 30-40% of the 10 million biomedical articles that had been published. 1 Encompassing articles published since 1946, Medline currently indexes citations from approximately 5,600 biomedical journals in 40 languages. 806,000 citations were added in 2015 alone. 2

Articles can be traced in two ways: by terms including words in the title, abstract, authors' names, or institution, or by a restricted thesaurus of hierarchically grouped medical terms, known as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms). 1 As with other databases, multiple search terms can be used simultaneously by combining them with the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT.

The best way to learn about bibliographic databases is to use them. Trisha Greenhalgh’s article 1 includes several worked examples that can be replicated in Medline.  

Embase, published by Elsevier, is another biomedical database consisting of around 30 million records from 8500 journals, with records dating back to 1974 (although Embase Classic includes citations dating back to 1947). 3 There is an overlap in coverage between Embase and Medline, but the former includes over 6 million citations that are not in Medline. Embase is more comprehensive on pharmacological literature and alternative therapies.  

Other databases

Other frequently used biomedical databases include:

• CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature) – indexes nursing and allied health journals
• Cochrane Library – includes Cochrane reviews, and Cochrane’s central register of controlled trials (CENTRAL), as well as health technology assessments and economic evaluations.
• Google Scholar – as well as journals and conferences papers, this includes books, dissertations, technical reports and patents
• PsychINFO – indexes psychological, social and behavioural science articles from the 1880s onwards
• Scopus – includes peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical and social sciences
• Web of Science – includes coverage of the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities  

Limitations of electronic databases

• Databases may not contain the most recent references
• Search results from bibliographic databases depend on the search strategy used and the quality of the indexing.
• Obtaining a comprehensive selection of references can involve searching several databases because their coverage varies and no single database accesses all available literature
• Most databases only include published articles; it is necessary to search separately for grey literature
• There is often a bias towards citations written in English
• Greenhalgh, T. How to read a paper: The Medline database. BMJ 1997 315: 180-183
• http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html - Accessed 8/04/17 https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/medline.html
• https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/embase-biomedical-research/embase-coverage-and-content – Accessed 8/04/17

© Helen Barratt 2009, Saran Shantikumar 2018

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Introduction to Electronic Literature

Introduction to Electronic Literature

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 27, 2018 • ( 0 )

Despite a landmark essay by the novelist Robert Coover , the emergence of literary writing in new media does not signal an “end of books.” Conceivably, there could be an end to literary studies as an autonomous discipline and a cessation of literary reading as a significant cultural practice. However, what new media enact is a more direct engagement of the literary arts with the arts of image, sound, and computation, and hence a renewed appreciation of a long-standing insight, available in the writings of Walter Ong , Elizabeth Eisenstein , and Marshall McLuhan but only now reaching general consciousness: the idea that print literature has long been part of a fragile “media ecology” (Tabbi and Wutz 1997). The representational requirements of literary narrative, for example, change radically after film takes up the burden of depicting realistic settings, and the placement of words in proximity to filmic, video, and sound elements continues that relocation of the literary in new media. With the redrawing of narrative and visual boundaries comes the emergence and continued differentiation of modern literary forms (whose reflexivity foregrounds verbal inventions that were always present in earlier writing, especially in sui generis narratives such as Tristram Shandy).

The continuation of the print legacy itself remains as uncertain as the fate of globalization and modernity (see Cochran 2001). For reading to re-emerge as a consequential activity in the new media ecology, more is required than the scanning, storage, and promotion of our classics. As books cease to be the primary storage vehicle for recording, preserving, and disseminating thought, our legacy texts need to be engaged actively in “born-digital” writing – which is to say, in works that are designed for the media where the current generation does its reading. We should not look to the internet for forms and genres that emerged in print and continue to thrive there. Rather, the task of defining electronic literature is an ongoing process of differentiation, not the least of which is the distinction between how we read books and how these practices circulate in current reading and writing spaces.

The Literary Prefiguration of The Internet

Electronic literature is not just a “thing” or a “medium” or even a body of “works” in various “genres.” It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, gaming, codework, or some new admixture of all these practices. Electronic literature is, arguably, an emerging cultural form, as much a collective creation of terms, keywords, genres, structures, and institutions as it is the production of new literary objects. The ideas of cybervisionaries Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Ted Nelson, foundational to the electronic storage, recovery, and processing of texts, go beyond practical insights and can be seen to participate in a longstanding ambition to construct a world literature in the sense put forward by David Damrosh: “not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading … that is applicable to individual works as to bodies of material” (Damrosh 2003: 5).

The failure of print scholars to create a space for traditional literature in new media is evident, however, even among those with an avowed interest in the “global” circulation of discourse. For example, the postcolonial scholar Arjun Appadurai (2000: 22) writes that “public spheres” are “increasingly dominated by electronic media (and thus delinked from the capacity to read and write)” (cited in Prendergast 2004). That “thus” can rankle. Obviously, Appadurai is not thinking of the internet, which is still (and likely always will be) overwhelmingly textual, despite an insistently instrumental visual presence. The assumption that reading and writing are of course “delinked” from electronic media shows just how deep the separation of spheres has become for scholars like Appadurai, who continue to evaluate globalization primarily through the reading and writing of printed materials. Appadurai and most of the contributors to Debating World Literature (Prendergast 2004) want to locate a literary practice commensurate with processes of globalization. But by dissociating reading and writing from electronic media, these scholars fail to entertain the idea that writing produced in new media might in fact be an emerging world literature.

It was not supposed to be like this. Appadurai’s casual dismissal of reading and writing as active elements in “electronic media” should seem strange if one recalls how cyberculture visionaries advanced the idea of a universally accessible, open-ended archive that primarily stores texts. That was the idea behind Vannevar Bush’s (1945) Memex and Ted Nelson ’s (1974) hypertext – not the current expanse of decontextualized hot links that take readers serially away from the text they are reading at any given time, but rather, a means of bringing documents, in part or in their entirety, to a single writing space for further commentary and the development of conceptual connections. The worldwide collaborative potential of collecting documents, not lost on these American information specialists after World War II, had already been expressed by the Belgian Paul Otlet in his Traité de documentation (1934). There the thought of connecting people to the libraries of the world via telephone and electronic screens led to his vision of a technological encyclopedia. In Otlet’s “conceptual prefiguration of the Internet” ( préfiguration conceptuelle d’Internet ), every extant work in print would be but chapters and paragraphs in a single “universal book” ( unique livre universel ) (Levie 2007).

Of course, Otlet, Bush, and Nelson understood that electronic media might include works of all countries, cultures, and languages. But inclusiveness alone did not make their vision universal. Rather, the operative feature everywhere in early cyber-literary thought – what would make the technologically enhanced book more than the sum total of books in print and in manuscript everywhere – was its promise of reshaping boundaries. National and cultural divisions would thereby shift toward more conceptual discriminations: the kind of distinction that does not separate people categorically but is capable of connecting them in discourse. Concepts and connections that had remained potential (because of the book’s physical separation from other books) could now be activated in the mind of a reader. The technological excitement lay, that is, precisely in its promise to renew the “capacity to read and write” (Appadurai), with the added value (so necessary to universalist thought) that the results of one’s reading could be conveyed to others, debated, and revised. In every case, the knowledge transfer would occur not through interpretive activity or through description or summary alone but because every user would be similarly free, in Nelson’s words, to “list, sketch, link, and annotate the complexities we seek to understand, then present ‘views’ of the complexities in many different forms” (Nelson 1974: 332).

Reconsidered in the context of computational and communications media, the universality of literature would not lie in attaining a single common language or in the expression of an essential human spirit but rather in inhabiting a common workspace. A word Nelson coined for this process was “transclusion” – an inclusion through site transfers of separate texts that could be full or partial, depending on one’s requirements: in every case, the “original” document or set of documents remains at its home address while being reproduced at the target address (not just referenced or linked sequentially). The achievement of this capacity, which can make reading and researching also a kind of worldwide consortium building, could potentially bring to the public a literary project that had earlier been considered private and secluded.

In If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , Italo Calvino implies the threat posed by entertainment media to literary privacy when he has his narrator advise the reader to shut the door and “let the world around you fade. … Tell the others right away, ‘No, I don’t want to watch TV!’ Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – ‘I’m reading, I don’t want to be disturbed!’ … Speak louder, yell: ‘I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!’ Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone” (Calvino 1979: 1). The situation is different in the collaborative, receptive media that, like the internet and unlike television, include text as a primary component – although here, too, demands JOSEPH TABBI 300 are made on a reader’s time and attention. In new media, readers can risk becoming like Calvino’s harried publisher later in the novel, whose room is full of books that are never read, only circulated and recirculated, their authors too well known to us as personalities and occasional celebrities for their works to hold any fascination.

In Industrial Poetics (2005), the poet and literary scholar Joe Amato questions whether even the authors of most blogs ever go back and read what they have written, for an audience that is for the most part never even hinted at in the writing. A literary text contains, traditionally and of necessity, an “implied reader” within its rhetorical structuring. Premature announcements of hypertext’s “interactivity” notwithstanding, a close reading of random unsponsored web writing reveals a deep inability of many would-be authors to imagine that someone actually could be reading or responding. Those sites that do attract readers, generally (still) attract authors – but web authorship may differ from print in that authors do not speak while readers listen: this is to say, print remains a broadcast media, directing communications from one to many – even though, unlike radio, television, and other broadcast media, the sense of one-to-one communication is achievable in print through the aforementioned creation of an “implied reader,” a role which any individual can, through attentive reading, apply to oneself. The internet, by contrast, is a reception medium, from many to many and without the narrative continuity or sustained rhetorical address needed to single out individuals.

In reception media such as Otlet’s universal book and the internet, documents and imaginative discourses are not given as ends in themselves but as material to be reworked, relocated, and remixed (to use an anachronistic formulation that came into vogue after the digitization of music). The idea that this potential needed to be liberated, implicit in Otlet and Bush, is made explicit in Nelson’s titular concept of “computer lib.” Nelson’s program for the freeing of mental capacities through human/machine interaction, consistent in so many ways with contemporary programs of racial, sexual, and lifestyle liberation (and often exceeding these in rhetorical fervor), to a degree brought technological transformations into the realm of worldwide social and cultural transformations.

Three decades into the computer revolution, the conceptual freedom celebrated by Nelson is no longer so convincing, and the open-source, do-it-yourself culture of file sharing is no longer so fluid when the interfaces encountered by most readers have been largely pre-formatted to serve commercial and instrumental ends. In the time of Nelson and Bush and during the rise of the IBM mainframe, computers were still largely available only to big business and a cohort of researchers. The personal computer came later, and no one predicted its transformation of the writing space essentially into an office and entertainment center. Under such conditions, the liberation of “minds” from the constraints of new media now requires a more active, oppositional role available not to the mass of computer users but only to a subgroup of “hackers” who are capable (often by breaking copyright laws and proprietary protections that did not exist in Nelson’s heyday) of penetrating and changing configurations at the level of source code. That kind of competence remains the domain of only a few.

“To hack,” writes the literary critic Adelaide Morris, “is to work within a set of constraints – linguistic rules, programmatic structures, protocols that organize data exchange and enable telecommunication connections – to keep possibilities in circulation. In this sense, the purpose of a hack is to interrupt inevitability, to put ghostly alternatives back into motion, to engender fresh abstractions, to find a way, like Emily Dickinson, to ‘Dwell in Possibility’” (Morris 2007). Only by keeping these constraints in view and at the same time “engendering fresh abstractions,” posing alternative source codes as well as experimental textual formations against the achieved configurations of worldwide commerce and communication, is it possible to maintain literature in its potential state – not as a revolutionary program to be realized (Nelson’s “computer lib”), but rather, as a condition for creativity.

The Dream Life of Literal Letters

First-generation electronic literature, contemporary with Ted Nelson at the dawn of the brief age of the “personal computer,” tended to explore the openness and freedom of linkages and modes of circulation that were available to authors having some programming knowledge and working with a range of often unreliable, but largely open-source, software. That may have helped reinforce Nelson’s libertarian pose, and proponents still speak of the “affordances” of ever new, mostly obsolescent technologies. Generally, however, the born-digital works that have lasted tend to gain creative traction not from exploiting ready-made affordances but from revealing and writing against the constraints inherent in additional levels of mediation (beyond the comparatively direct linkage from mind to hand to pen and paper). It is no accident, for example, that games – concerned with rules of operation and conduct – were among the first achieved examples of electronic literature and they remain the only commercially viable practice for the literary arts.

Robert Pinsky

With the publication in 1984 of Mindwheel , Robert Pinsky contributed not only a pioneering work of electronic literature but also a rare crossing over from the literary world, where he was a recognized poet teaching English at Berkeley. Pinsky brought his abilities to interactive fiction, which many people at the time saw as “just games.” Thomas Disch, a novelist and poet, did something similar with his game Amnesia , but Disch was frustrated that no one would recognize and review Amnesia as literature and he denounced interactive fiction afterwards. Pinsky didn’t do this, but neither did he remain active as an author of electronic literature. The same can be said of Robert Coover , who introduced a generation of graduate students at Brown University to the practice of electronic literature but himself continued to write print novels.

The same can be said of each author who has achieved a reputation in the field of electronic literature: the poet Stefanie Strickland presents online and print versions of her major work, V: Wave.Son.Nets/Losing L’Una (2002); Michael Joyce (who according to his Vassar University web page is “no longer maintaining a public web presence”) has moved from his landmark hypertext, Afternoon: A Story of 1987–91, to a print novel, Liam’s Going , published in 2002; and Shelley Jackson has achieved a successful transition from her debut e-literary work, Patchwork Girl , a cyber-feminist hypertext revision of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , to a career of cross-genre (and cross-gendered) experimentation in print (2002’s The Melancholy of Anatomy and 2006’s Half Life ) and in performance art – notably her Skin Project , a network narrative in which each word is tattooed on the skin of a volunteer. In such work, electronic literature emerges as a realization of literary qualities that might reference, but rarely tries to reproduce, the narrativity and lyrical flow that remain the province of print. Jackson herself sees her work as continuous with the very literary goal of producing a world apart from our conventional narratives. But Jackson’s hybrid literary “world” is “full of things that you can wander around in, rather than a record or memory of those wanderings” (Jackson 1998). Electronic literature, then, to a degree, represents a move from the literary to the literal – a presentation not of stories but of words themselves as they are transformed by multiple media.

In second-generation electronic literature, not infrequently, not even the word but the letter becomes the unit of operation, as in Brian Kim Stefans’s “Star Wars: One Letter at a Time” (2006). There, for example, Stefans might present, flashing on the screen and accompanied by the sound of a clicking typewriter, the letters purportedly typed by Star Wars creator George Lucas, one letter at a time. Typically for works of electronic literature, Stefans presented the work in the context of an art exhibition. Significantly, he presented the work along with a generic tag: “lettrism.” Playfully, since the ring of the typewriter can be heard at the end of each typed line, the author further locates the work under the category of “bell letters.”

The invention of terms and creation of new categories on the page or in linked documents, if conducted collaboratively in a networked environment of metatags, keywords, and coded reference, could give the literary community control over language’s current development and its materiality in letters. The metatag offers a literary specificity and materiality not achievable in print. Through tags and glosses that attach to the text and reappear in other similarly tagged texts, readers everywhere can indicate types and genres that will be searchable, so long as they are recognized by other readers and other taggers. The terms attach directly to a range of texts, unlike a literary index that requires the turning of pages, or notes that require access to a book or article in some other physical location. As electronic literature develops, new genres will need to emerge (different from, say, “novels,” “poems,” and “narratives,” whose conceptual work evolved with print and can best be experienced there). The development of a metatag vocabulary, continuous with the development of electronic literature itself, is unique in that each stage in this development, determined by crowd consciousness more than by critical fiat, can be recorded and traced by readers and researchers (see Heckman and Tabbi 2010).

Authors of born-digital work (notably Mez [Mary-Anne Breeze], who has invented a literary language, Mezangel, mixing coded symbols and English) extend this control to computer code, which is sometimes written to be read as text, though this practice is surely exceptional. As John Cayley (2002) puts it in the title to his contribution to the “cyberdebates” at http://www.electronicbookreview . com, “The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text).” When code operates at speed, it is not being read by humans, and besides, those literary authors who create code will always be a minority, a professional cadre or community of hackers whose specialized and often proprietary knowledge is less and less likely to reach the universality (among educated classes) of print literacy. Even if widespread code literacy were achieved, it is unlikely that people would think in code, the way everybody thinks (and communicates) in language. Information might be lost in translation from one linguistic language to another, and this is not a hindrance but rather a condition of literariness – as David Damrosh recognizes when he makes the capacity to “gain in translation” one of his criteria for world literature (Damrosh 2003: 281). Code, by contrast, is not enriched by being brought into written language – it simply becomes inoperable.

What the creation of terms in print and metatags in electronic networks can accomplish is a positioning of the imagination at the place where language is generated. Hence the creativity of Ben Marcus, whose aesthetic emerges from the intersection of mathematics and semantics, is a mode of invention wholly consistent with an electronic environment where letters, words, and sentences themselves are capable of becoming elements of a network (in this case, the specifically verbal network of definitions and cross-references in a glossary):

SHIRT OF NOISE Garment, fabric, or residue that absorbs and holds sound, storing messages for journeys. Its loudness cannot be soothed. It can destroy the member which inhabits it. …

CARL Name applied to food built from textiles, sticks, and rags. Implements used to aid ingestion are termed, respectively, the lens, the dial, the knob. …

SPEED-FASTING EXPERIMENTS Activity or practice of accelerated food abstention. It was first conducted in Buffalo. The record death by fasting occurred in two days, through motor-starving and exhaustion, verbal. (Marcus 1995: 14, 41, 44)

Marcus’s writing is not born digital. Published in 1995, The Age of Wire and String could have accounted for the internet only in its infancy, when it was still used mostly by scientists, small working groups, and niche social networks. If Marcus’s work is “experimental,” it is so in the best sense of trying out concepts and carrying a certain hypothesis through to the end (however counterintuitive or defamiliarizing the conclusion might be). Wire and String, a network of short experimental fictions in print, has the feel of electronic literature. It has the capacity to conceive of language in some primordial state of semantic mutability where each word can first take on meanings arbitrarily, based on how we happen to hear of a term or where we look it up, and then can build new meanings in use, as one term comes into contact with other terms. Meanings accrue not primarily by narrative means alone but rather by glossary-like definitions and cross-references, a “dreamlife of letters” that Stefans would literalize in his “Internet text” but which has haunted print culture for a long time.

Constrained Writing

By contrast to the early, “computer-liberated” writing of first-generation electronic literature, the work of Cayley, Stefans , Strickland, and others develops in the contexts of the internet and database technology and so tends to be more aware of the limitations of proprietary technologies. Second-generation electronic literature is often more consciously about writing under constraint. While embracing expressive freedoms in their vocabulary and syntax, secondgeneration electronic literary works formally reflect a growing sense that limits have been reached, materially and ecologically, in the rationalist technological project. Aware of the contingency of technology (and the more likely universality of abstract mathematics and language, which are of course embodied in but not tied to some specific technology or software), electronic literature can develop differently, more universally. Electronic literature can achieve universality by placing greater importance precisely on words whose presence is not platform-specific, or at least by striving for platform independence in a Semantic Web (Web 2.0) environment of shared keywords and metatags. The renewal of semantic diversity could be as important to “ecological” literature as any topical engagement with questions of biodiversity and declining resources. The “exhaustion, verbal” cited by Marcus compels a renewed verbal invention as well as a backward-looking, etymological, and (in Stefans) typographical exploration.

This displacement of writing from formal to semantic constraints is already recognizable in the work of several precursors of constrained writing, notably the Oulipo group (ouvroir de littérature potentielle) whose members selfconsciously have submitted their verbal productions to mathematical rigor. The reasons for shifting to semantic constraints were set out, for example, by Harry Mathews, who (consistent with Marcus) defines literary potential as a question of new words, “beyond the words being read,” lying “in wait to subvert and perhaps surpass them” (cited in Motte 1986: 126). With computers as one – but not an exclusive – context for renewed literary creation, Mathews approaches the problem of writing in constrained environments through a straightforward and familiar distinction, between syntax (how a phrase, sentence, or work is structured) and semantics (what a site or work is about conceptually and not only in terms of information). The distinction has been important in the development of the Oulipo away from mainly structural, combinatorial, and material experimentation (where the mathematical structure is outside the process of creation) toward a concern with the ends of narrative, content, and creativity. “Mathews’s Algorithm,” an essay in Warren F. Motte’s Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (1986), is remarkable precisely in its concern with gathering and recombining semantic elements from past literatures – as, on the one hand, a mode of literary commentary and, on the other hand, a stimulation to the creation of new stories, potential stories that haunt those we know from the literary canon.

Mathews’s concern with semantic innovation (rather than narrative or generic continuity) hints at the kinds of continuities that are enabled in our move from predominantly print to electronic environments. Not least, the Oulipian project of recovering not masterworks but productive constraints from prior eras (even prior to print) offers an excellent precursor to the current project of carrying literary qualities from the past into new media environments. “Mathews’s Algorithm,” instead of proposing numerical constraints exclusively, would enable authors to identify and select “semantic elements” from (for example) a play by Shakespeare so as to mark phrases, words, and episodes and then to reconfigure the events and outcomes, producing alternative plays. But Mathews does not stop there. He extends his tabulation to include elements in Hamlet of “love,” “possession,” and “victory” and how these terms course through moments of “consummation,” “danger,” “war,” and so forth. Here, “the elements are far more abstract” than the numerical constraints on plot and structure, though still the “abstractions fall short of a concept” (Mathews 1986). That prospect, using words to generate conceptual configurations, while still to be realized, is now actively being pursued by many, among them several literary writers, in the (as yet speculative) construction of a worldwide Semantic Web (Web 2.0).

Toward A Semantic Literary Web

The reason authors would want to interest themselves in a Semantic Web is straightforward. This network promises to establish within electronic environments a place where connections have to do with semantics, involving conceptual linkages among documents, not the decontextualized hot links of the internet as we have known it (namely, Web 1.0). Semantic Web database technology allows not only the tracking of keywords and concepts but also an awareness of their evolution in time. If works are identified and tagged not just according to bibliographical criteria (author, title, and publication date) but also according to literary values (for example, representations of the “actual structures and modes of functioning of literary genres” cited in Prendergast 2004: x), then the opportunity emerges for the creation of a “living” archive (where past works are, in Nelson’s terms, “transcluded” into the writing space of new works). To be sure, the living archive is highly presentist: past works that are not tagged and transcluded will be lost and forgotten or, given the inevitability of technical obsolesence, they will be accessible only to forensic recovery, which means they’re as good as gone (see Kirshenbaum 2008).

“Leaves and writings fade, but words remain,” as Jean Lescure noted in “A Brief History of Oulipo” (cited in Motte 1986: 32). A literary deployment of database technology has to be, like literature itself, reflexive and flexible, capable of looking forward to corresponding works by others as well as backward to discovered precedents, able to reference print and born-digital works with equal ease. A viable electronic literary practice also needs to persist and continually reproduce itself in a shifting “now” that changes each time a work is brought in touch with another work, past or future. Indeed, “publication” itself needs to evolve so that a work’s significance is accounted for, not by the number of hits or number of objects distributed and sold, but by the density of connections.

The Semantic Web project (Web 2.0), to realize itself, depends on the adoption of Web standards and a certain a priori agreement in principle by practitioners in numerous fields, among which literature is unlikely to take the lead (although one hopes the literary won’t be left behind, its critics debating technoculture while the work of material creation is left to others). What is found during electronic searches would depend, in principle, not on a matching of character strings but on the identification of metadata and the development of a terminological vocabulary shared among numerous content providers, creators of literary works among them. Not all texts on the internet would be so marked, but those that did conform to a developing conceptual vocabulary would be available to searches and (proponents argue) would reinforce and be reinforced by other texts using a conforming vocabulary. This conformity at the level of the database, however, should not produce conceptual uniformity: new names, hybrids, and descriptors can be created continually. The development of the field would in some sense be the change in the frequency with which certain names are used and others drift into disuse. This is a viable use of the Semantic Web. It differs from the utopian promise, roundly critiqued by Florian Cramer (2007), that “semantic technology” can “allow people to phrase search terms as normal questions, thus giving computer illiterates easier access to the Internet.” The quest for natural language intelligence using computers, a grail of AI research for the past thirty years, had best be set aside – just as the pursuit of narrative can be safely left to its continued development in print. Not all literary qualities need to migrate into electronic environments, but some qualities, semantic descriptors, for example, can be put to literary use. In this more limited version, enacted by humans in collaboration with machine intelligences, the Semantic Web would appear to be consistent with the cultural traffic that in past centuries generated the idea of a world literature, though it differs from past exchanges in that literary genres are not just discussable but capable of being identified and tracked during the time of their development: persistence, in such a practice, would be given not by critical canon formations but rather by an emerging crowd consciousness, enacted by anyone and all who take an active interest in tagging the texts they find valuable.

A Coalescence of Theory And Fiction

A critical practice equipped to engage the world-building potential of electronic literature will emerge only when such syntactic/materialist awareness is also informed by a semantic approach, one that can trace what works are about – what genres they employ and deform, and how concepts circulate within individual works and in networks too. Indications of such a critical approach turn up not frequently but often enough to give a sense of what is at stake. When Jaishree Odin (2007) describes a prominent e-lit production by Talan Memmot as being about “the coming into being of words and sentences as codework,” and when Odin notes, moreover, that such a development reflects “a coalescence of theory and fiction,” this literary critic is finding in Memmot’s work a promise held by the Semantic Web itself. When Lori Emerson (2008) describes an “emergent, flexible poetics” that embraces avant-garde traditions in both bookbound and digital poetries, she indicates how poetry always tends to “move toward abstraction,” using formal invention not as an end in itself but as a way to convey meanings beyond the materiality of sense and syntax and (on screens especially) to enact spatial relations beyond measure and number. Eric Rasmussen (2008) in his turn has usefully proposed the term “senseless resistance” for describing how affective elements of aesthetic objects resist being encoded into the symbolic mode.

Once we leave aside the sense-making and narrative satisfactions of print literature, we might learn to admire the computer-aided virtuosity of a work of electronic literature such as 2002: A Palindrome Story, 2002 words in length, by electronic literary artist Nick Montfort and Spineless Books publisher William Gillespie. Beating a record set precisely by an Oulipo member, 2002 establishes a direct line from the Oulipo to electronic literary practice. But the primary continuity – what counts as a world literary practice – is more a matter of Montfort’s and Gillespie’s perpetuating a literary network of collaborative JOSEPH TABBI 308 text production. In this case, with the passing of print into one tradition among many emergent practices, the constraint “discovered” in past literature is the Oulipo program itself.

Montfort/Gillespie and Queneau certainly share a willingness to subject themselves to arbitrary rules: that a “story” must read the same going forward as going backward or that a line in a Queneau poem (or, rather, his 100 Trillion Poems ) must make sense when read with previous or subsequent lines in another poem from the same ten-page collection. But Oulipian and electronic literary practice do not aim at the creation of compelling narratives or absorbing poetic meditations. Those will continue to be produced in print, a medium we can now appreciate as uniquely suited to narrative demands for the creation over time of beginnings, middles, and ends (a working out of information through sequence and duration that more often than not is frustrated in electronic environments). Even a subversion of closure or a nonchronological narrative, to be meaningful, needs to happen against prose structures that reasonably extend over a period of time. Indeed, one signal accomplishment of electronic literature may have been to help locate narrativity not as a literary universal but as one of many literary qualities best realized in particular media such as print and film.

“O readers, meet Bob. (Elapse, year! Be glass! Arc!) Bob’s a gem” (Montfort and Gillespie 2002). Indeed, he is. At any rate, Bob’s as good a protagonist as Anna or Inna, Kiki or Abba, or for that matter Bob’s babe, Babs. Individual preference is beside the point when it comes to the production and reception of Oulipian works and works of electronic literature. What the Oulipo offered instead of isolated, subjectively rich poems, stories, and critical prose was an alternative way of looking at literary practice, a new formulation of its problems and its potential. This alternative, in turn, would be as much a project of rereading and reformatting achieved work as of creating new works.

What the Oulipo was doing, not coincidentally during the same early years of cybernetic exploration that produced the visions of Bush (1945) and Nelson (1974), the mathematics of Norbert Wiener and the sociology of Gregory Bateson, is caught up in the unprecedented proximity of literature to computers, the coexistence in the same writing space of code and text, perceptual image and temporal narrative. The literary precedence of Oulipo, of Otlet’s 1934 prefiguration of the internet, of postmodern literature, and of other past programs to be rediscovered (and whose potential may be recognized and realized for the first time in new media environments), constitutes the promise of electronic literature.

Source: Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini. The Routledge Companion To Literature And Science . London: Routledge, 2012. Print. Bibliography Amato, J. (2006) Industrial Poetics, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Appadurai, A. (2000) Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bush, V. (1945) “As we may think,” Atlantic Monthly (July). Calvino, I. (1979) If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. W. Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Cochran, T. (2001) The Twilight of the Literary: figures of thought in the age of print, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Coover, R. (1992) “The end of books,” The New York Times Review of Books (21 June). Cramer, F. (2007) “Critique of the ‘semantic web,’ ” Nettime. Online. Available HTTP: . Damrosh, D. (2003) What Is World Literature?, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Emerson, L. (2008) “The rematerialization of poetry: from the bookbound to the digital,” PhD diss., University of Buffalo. Heckman, D. and Tabbi, J. (2010) “Electronic literature directory working group handbook.” Online. Jackson, S. (1998) “Stitch bitch: the hypertext author as cyborg-femme narrator,” interview with Mark Amerika. Online. Kirschenbaum, M.G. (2008) Mechanisms: new media and the forensic imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Levie, F. (2007) Excerpts on Paul Otlet from her book L’homme qui voulait classifier le monde, in Les impressions novelles. Online. Liu, A. (2004) The Laws of Cool: knowledge, work, and the culture of information, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, B. (1995) The Age of Wire and String, New York: Knopf. Mathews, H. (1986) “Mathews’s Algorithm,” in Motte 1986. Montfort, N. and Gillespie, W. (2002) “2002: a palindrome story.” Online. Morris, A. (2007) “How to think (with) thinkertoys,” Electronic Book Review (posted October 10). Online. Motte, W.F. (ed.) (1986) Oulipo: a primer of potential literature, Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1998. Nelson, T. (1974) “Computer lib/dream machines,” in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003, pp. 303–38. Odin, J. (2007) “The database, the interface, and the hypertext: a reading of Strickland’s V,” Electronic Book Review. Otlet, P. (1934) Traité de Documentation: le livre sur le livre, theorie et pratique, Brussels: Mundanaem. Pinsky, R., Hales, S., Mataga, W. and Sanford, R. (1984) Mindwheel, Synapse Software. Prendergast, C. (ed.) (2004) Debating World Literature, London: Verso. Rasmussen, E. (2008) “Senseless resistances: affect and materiality in postmodern american fiction,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago. Stefans, B.K. (2006) “Star wars: one letter at a time,” Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1. Online. Strickland, S. (2002) V: Wave.Son.Nets/Losing L’Una, New York: Penguin. Online. Tabbi, J. (2007) “Toward a semantic literary web: setting a direction for the electronic literature organization directory,” Electronic Literature Organization, Vol. 1.0. ——and Wutz, M. (eds) (1997) Reading Matters: narrative in the new media ecology, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Montfort, N. (eds) (2003) The New Media Reader, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Share this:

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Afternoon: A Story , Amnesia , Cybercriticism , cybernetics , Digital Theory , E-lit , E-Litrature , Electronic Literature , Elizabeth Eisenstein , Half Life , Hypertext , Industrial Poetics , Introduction to Electronic Literature , Liam’s Going , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Michael Joyce , Mindwheel , Patchwork Girl , Paul Otlet , Pequeño Glazier , Robert Pinsky , Shelley Jackson , Ted Nelson , Thomas Disch , Traité de documentation , Walter Ong

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

A Guide to Database and Catalog Searching: Bibliographic Elements

• Get started here.
• Choosing and Evaluating Sources of Information
• Bibliographic Elements
• Library of Congress Call Numbers
• Find It @ NSULA Libraries!
• CQ Researcher
• Project MUSE
• APA/ PsycInfo
• Advanced Features in EBSCO Databases

                                          For more information about bibliographic citation, click here for the Citation LibGuide.

Citations and Bibliographic Elements

Bibliographic elements are the pieces of information used to describe a book, journal/periodical/magazine, newspaper, or Internet resource. this descriptive information is used to create a bibliography (sometimes known as a Reference List or Works Cited). Every citation format or style includes the same four elements: author, date, title, and source (which may be the book publisher, the journal information for an article, and the electronic information like DOI).  This information comes from the title page of a book or journal, the electronic record in a database,or  the label on a CD or DVD. For a website, look at the top and bottom of a page or in the "About" section to find author, title, publisher, and date. For help, consult an instructor or a librarian.

Bibliographic Elements of a Book

Author: John R. Searle. Title: The Rediscovery of the Mind. Publisher: MIT Press. Place and Date of Publication: Cambridge, MA, 1992.

Bibliographic Elements of an Article

Author: Searle, John R. Title: "Insight and Error in Wittgenstein." Journal information: Philosophy of the Social Sciences.  Volume 46, issue 6, page range  527-47. Date: December 2016. DOI: 10.1177/0048393116649969

Look at the detailed record or on the article itself for more information.

• << Previous: Citation, not Plagiarism!
• Next: Find Library Books >>
• Last Updated: Feb 15, 2024 4:36 PM
• URL: https://libguides.nsula.edu/howtosearch

• University Library

What is an electronic database?

• FiNDit Support
• Have Your Say
• Library Announcements
• Student Wellbeing
• University FAQs
• 60 Academic support
• 25 Access issues
• 32 Blackboard
• 71 Borrowing
• 23 Copyright
• 50 Databases
• 86 Finding information
• 85 IT Services
• 46 My Library
• 26 Print/copy/scan
• 34 Reading Lists
• 190 Referencing
• 15 Refworks
• 18 Research support

Answered By: Ali Nearn Last Updated: Jun 30, 2022     Views: 30961

An electronic database is a searchable electronic collection of resources. There are two basic types of databases:

• Indexes or bibliographic databases
• Full-text databases.

Indexes or bibliographic databases, also known as indexing and abstracting services, provide:

• Indexing information for topical searching across resources in multiple formats (including multidisciplinary searches)
• Abstracts (short descriptions) of the contents (eg. articles), to help you decide if it is relevant to your research.

Full-text databases provide the same services as above, but also include the full text of articles, allowing you to read it online, or download it for offline reading.

These databases allow the University Library to provide students and staff of Notre Dame with access to thousands of  journals, as well as ebooks, newspaper articles, reports; pictures, and streaming video content.

Notes:  The University Library uses the term eResources to include all our databases as well as apps and other electronic content that we subscribe to. The database contents and most of the eResources are not owned by the University but licensed from the various providers. These licenses restrict access to currently enrolled students and contracted staff, and prevents re-use or re-publication of the materials they contain.

Links & Files

• University Library - eResources
• What is FiNDit?
• Share on Facebook

Was this helpful? Yes 1203 No 31

Comments (0)

Chapter 13: Works Cited

What is Bibliographic Information?

Bibliographic information refers to specific elements such as the author’s name, the title of the thing (book, documentary, journal article) and the date it was created. Author + Title + Date are the most common pieces of information and they are often found on a book’s title page and the back of the title page, also known as the verso. Often the date is found on the verso.

For example:

Verso of title page

© 2015 Chelsea Vowel

APA reference for this book

Vowel, C. (2016). Indigenous writes: A guide to First nations, Métis, and Inuit issues in Canada . HighWater Press.

MLA reference for this book

Vowel, Chelsea. Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada . HighWater Press, 2016.

The exact bits of information you need depends on the type of resource being cited.

Bibliographic information for a journal article includes

• publication date
• a volume number, and sometimes an issue number.
• the title of the journal
• the title of the article

This screenshot shows bibliographic information for online journal article published in a journal called The American Sociologist

APA reference for this journal article

Deflem, M. (2013). Professor goes gaga: Teaching Lady Gaga and the sociology of fame. The American Sociologist, 44(2), 117-131.   doi: 10.1007/s12108-013-9180-y

MLA reference for this journal article

Deflem, Mathieu. “Professor Goes Gaga: Teaching Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame.” The American Sociologist, vol. 44, no.2, (2013), pp. 117-131.  doi: 10.1007/s12108-013-9180-y

Bibliographic information for a chapter in a book includes 2 titles — the chapter title and the book title.

APA reference for this chapter in an online book

Snively, G., & Corsiglia, J. (2016). Indigenous science: proven, practical and timeless. In G. Snively & Wanosts’a7 Lorna Williams (Eds.), Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science , Book 1. Victoria: University of Victoria.

Chapter 6 – Indigenous Science: Proven, Practical and Timeless

MLA reference for this chapter in an online book

Snively, Gloria and John Corsiglia. “Indigenous Science: Proven, Practical and Timeless.” Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science , Book 1, edited by Gloria Snively and Wanosts’a7 Lorna Williams, University of Victoria, 2016.

pressbooks.bccampus.ca/knowinghome/chapter/chapter-6/

Bibliographic information for a resource on the web may include a URL or DOI – digital object identifier.

APA reference for this online resource

Conover, M. D., Ferrara, E., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2013). The digital evolution of Occupy Wall Street. PloS One , 8(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064679

MLA reference for this online resource

Conover, Michael D., et al. “The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street.” PloS One , vol. 8, no. 5, 2013. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064679

Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research Copyright © 2018 by Ryerson University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Library Terminology: Glossary of Library Terms

How to use this glossary.

Did you see word on the library's website that confused you?  Use this guide to find words commonly used in the library.  

Is there a word you found on the library's website that doesn't appear in this glossary?  Contact Christal Young for help or to have the term added to this list.

This glossary is designed to introduce you to words/terminology commonly used in an academic library setting.

Click on the letters below to jump to that section of the alphabet:

Abstract: "A summary or brief description of the content of another longer work. An abstract is often provided along with the citation to a work."

Almanac: " 1. A collection, usually annual, of statistics and facts, both current and retrospective. May be broad in geographical and subject coverage, or limited to a particular country or state or to a special subject. 2. An annual containing miscellaneous matter, such as a calendar, a list of astronomical events, planting tables, astrological predictions, and anecdotes" (Definition from Yale University Library )

Annotation: " 1. A note that describes, explains, or evaluates; especially such a note added to an entry in a bibliography, reading list, or catalog. 2. Process of making such notes. Annotation is the end product of making such notes." (Definition from Colorado State University Libraries )

Archives: " 1. A space which houses historical or public records. 2. The historical or public records themselves, which are generally non-circulating materials such as collections of personal papers, rare books, ephemera, etc."

Article: "A brief work—generally between 1 and 35 pages in length—on a topic. Often published as part of a journal, magazine, or newspaper."

Atlas: "A book or bound collection of maps, illustrations, etc.; Volume of maps, plates, engravings, tables, etc., which may be used to accompany a text; or it may be an independent publication." (Definition from Colorado State University Libraries )

Attachment: "A separate file (e.g., text, spreadsheet, graphic, audio, video) sent with an email message."

Authentication: "A security process that typically employs usernames and passwords to validate the identity of users before allowing them access to certain information."

Author: "The person(s) or organization(s) that wrote or compiled a document. Looking for information under its author's name is one option in searching."

Back to the top

Bibliography: "A list containing citations to the resources used in writing a research paper or other document." See also:  Reference .  

Book: "A relatively lengthy work, often on a single topic. May be print or electronic."

Book stacks: "Shelves in the library where materials—typically books—are stored. Books in the book stacks are normally arranged by call number . May be referred to simply as the “stacks.”

Boolean operator: "A word—such as AND, OR, or NOT—that commands a computer to combine search terms. Helps to narrow (AND, NOT) or broaden (OR) searches."

Browser: "A software program that enables users to access Internet resources. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Mozilla Firefox are all browsers."

Call Number "A group of letters and/or numbers that identifies a specific item in a library and provides a way for organizing library holdings. Two major types of call numbers are Dewey Decimal Call Numbers and Library of Congress Call Numbers."

Catalog "A database (either online or on paper cards) listing and describing the books, journals, government documents, audiovisual and other materials held by a library. Various search terms allow you to look for items in the catalog."

CD "An abbreviation for compact disc; it is used for storing digital information."

Chat "The ability to communicate with others, computer to computer, via typed messages."

Check out: "To borrow/rent/loan/issue an item from a library for a fixed period of time in order to read, listen to, or view it. Check-out periods vary by library. Items are checked out at the circulation desk ."

Circulation desk: "The place in the library where you check out , renew , and return library materials. You may also place a hold , report an item missing from the shelves, or pay late fees or fines there." Also called a Loan desk . 

Citation "A reference to a book, magazine or journal article, or other work containing all the information necessary to identify and locate that work. A citation to a book thus includes its author's name, title, publisher and place of publication, and date of publication."

Controlled vocabulary: "Standardized terms used in searching a specific database." Also see:  Descriptors ,   Subject heading .

Course reserve: "A selection of books, articles, videotapes, or other materials that instructors want students to read or view for a particular course. Print reserve materials are usually kept in one area of the library and circulate for only a short period of time." See also: Electronic reserve .

Database: "A collection of information stored in an electronic format that can be searched by a computer."

Descriptor "A word that describes the subject of an article or book; used in many computer databases."

Dial-up: "A device using telephone lines that allows a computer to access the Internet or two computers to communicate."

Dissertation: "An extended written treatment of a subject (like a book) submitted by a graduate student as a requirement for a doctorate."

Document delivery - A service that retrieves or photocopies information sources for library users."  Also see Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery (IDD) , our guide on USC's document delivery system.

Download: " 1. To transfer information from a computer to a program or storage device to be viewed at a later date. 2. To transfer information from one computer to another computer using a modem."

E-book (or Electronic book): "An electronic version of a book that can be read on a computer or mobile device."

Editor: "A person or group responsible for compiling the writings of others into a single information source. Looking for information under its editor's name is one option in searching."

Electronic reserve (or E-reserve): "An electronic version of a course reserve that is read on a computer display screen." See also: Course reserve .

Encyclopedia: "A work containing information on all branches of knowledge or treating comprehensively a particular branch of knowledge (such as history or chemistry). Often has entries or articles arranged alphabetically."

Full-text: "A complete electronic copy of a resource, usually an article, viewed on a computer display screen. The term "full-text" is often used to refer to the electronic version of an article or book that is also published in print."

Glossary:  "An   alphabetical   list   of   terms   specialized   to   a   field   of knowledge   with   definitions   or  explanations."

Hardware: "The physical and electronic components of a computer system, such as the monitor, keyboard and mouse. Hardware works in conjunction with software."

Hold: "A request by a user to a library that a book checked out to another person be saved for that user when it is returned. “Holds” can generally be placed on any regularly circulating library materials through an in-person or online circulation desk ."

Holdings: "The materials owned by a library."

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): "The computer language used to create documents on the World Wide Web so that they are readable by Web browsers."

Hyperlink: "An image or a portion of text which a Web user can click to jump to another document or page on the Web. Textual hyperlinks are often underlined and appear as a different color than the majority of the text on a Web page."

Icon: "A small symbol on a computer screen that represents a computer operation or data file."

Index: " 1. A list of names or topics—usually found at the end of a publication—that directs you to the pages where those names or topics are discussed within the publication. 2. A printed or electronic publication that provides references to periodical articles or books by their subject, author, or other search terms."

Instant Messaging (IM): "An Internet-based service allowing real-time, text communication between two or more users. Instant messaging is also known as chat, especially when more than two people are communicating."

Interlibrary Loan (ILL): "A service that allows you to borrow materials from other libraries through your own library." See also: Document delivery .

Internet: "A worldwide network of computer networks that allows for the transmission and exchange of files. The World Wide Web is part of the Internet."

Journal: "A publication, issued on a regular basis, which contains scholarly research published as articles, papers, research reports, or technical reports.: See also: Periodical .

Journal title: "The name of a journal. Journal title is one common search term."

Keyword: "A significant or memorable word or term in the title, abstract, or text of an information resource that indicates its subject and is often used as a search term."

Known Item Search:  "A search for an item or article when you have some or all of the citation information ."

Limits/limiters: "Options used in searching that restrict your results to only information resources meeting certain other, non-subject-related, criteria. Limiting options vary by database, but common options include limiting results to materials available full-text in the database, to scholarly publications, to materials written in a particular language, to materials available in a particular location, or to materials published at a specific time."

Link: See Hyperlink .

Loan Desk : See Circulation desk . 

Magazine: "A publication, issued on a regular basis, containing popular articles, written and illustrated in a less technical manner than the articles found in a journal."

Microform: "A reduced sized photographic reproduction of printed information on reel to reel film (microfilm) or film cards (microfiche) or opaque pages that can be read with a microform reader/printer."

Mouse: "A device that allows the user to move and click the cursor on a computer screen for different functions."

Multimedia: "Any information resource that presents information using more than one media (print, picture, audio, or video)."

Newspaper: "A publication containing information about varied topics that are pertinent to general information, a geographic area, or a specific subject matter (i.e. business, culture, education). Often published daily."

Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC): "A computerized database that can be searched in various ways—such as by keyword, author, title, subject, or call number—to find out what resources a library owns. OPAC’s will supply listings of the title, call number, author, location, and description of any items matching one's search. Also referred to as “library catalog” or “online catalog.” You can search USC's OPAC (or USC Library's Catalog)  here .

Page/Paging: "To summon or call by name" (Definition from The Free Dictionary ).  If a book or other library item is located at another location, you can page, or "summon" the book to be sent to your location.  For example, to obtain a book from Grand Avenue Library, an off-site USC Library, will require you to page the item and pick it up from Leavey Library.  This generally takes one business day.  For more information on paging from Grand, click here . 

PDF: "A file format developed by Adobe Acrobat® that allows files to be transmitted from one computer to another while retaining their original appearance both on-screen and when printed. An acronym for P ortable D ocument F ormat."

Peer reviewed journal: "Peer review is a process by which editors have experts in a field review books or articles submitted for publication by the  experts’ peers. Peer review helps to ensure the quality of an information source by publishing only works of proven validity, methodology, and quality. Peer-reviewed journals are also called refereed or scholarly journals."

Periodical: "An information source published in multiple parts at regular intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, biannually). Journals , magazines , and newspapers are all periodicals." See also: Serial .

Primary source : "An original record of events, such as a diary, a newspaper article, a public record, or scientific documentation."

Print: "The written symbols of a language as portrayed on paper. Information sources may be either print or electronic."

Print Card: "A card that enables its user to print from a computer, or to make copies of a document at a photocopy machine. Student ID cards sometimes serve as copy cards."  For more information see the " Library Printing and Copying " page.

Proxy server: "An Internet server that acts as a “go-between” for a computer on a local network (secure system) and the open Web. Often checks to determine “right of access” to the secure environment and speeds up requests by caching frequently accessed Web pages. Can also act as a firewall."

Recall: "A request for the return of library material before the due date."

Refereed journal: See Peer reviewed journal .

Reference: " 1. A service that helps people find needed information. 2. Sometimes "reference" refers to reference collections, such as encyclopedias, indexes, handbooks, directories, etc. 3. A citation to a work is also known as a reference."

Remote access: "The ability to log onto (or access) networked computer resources from a distant location. Remote access makes available library databases to students researching from home, office, or other locations outside the library."

Renew/Renewal: "A lengthening (or extension) of the loan period for library materials."

Reserve: " 1 . A service providing special, often short-term, access to course-related materials (book or article readings, lecture notes, sample tests) or to other materials (CD-ROMs, audio-visual materials, current newspapers or magazines). 2. Also the physical location—often a service desk or room—within a library where materials on reserve are kept. Materials can also be made available electronically." See also: Course reserve , Electronic reserve .

Scholarly: See Peer reviewed .

Search statement/Search Query: "Words entered into the search box of a database or search engine when looking for information. Words relating to an information source's author, editor, title, subject heading or keyword serve as search terms. Search terms can be combined by using Boolean operators and can also be used with limits/limiters."

Secondary sources: "Materials such as books and journal articles that analyze primary sources. Secondary sources usually provide evaluation or interpretation of data or evidence found in original research or documents such as historical manuscripts or memoirs."

Serial: "Publications such as journals, magazines and newspapers that are generally published multiple times per year, month, or week. Serials usually have number volumes and issues. The words journal, magazine, periodical, and serial may be used interchangeably."

Software: "The programs installed on and used by the components of a computer system (or, hardware)."

Stacks: See Book stacks .

Style manual: "An information source providing guidelines for people who are writing research papers. A style manual outlines specific formats for arranging research papers and citing the sources that are used in writing the paper." See Citation .  Also see our Citation Guide .

Subject heading: "Descriptions of an information source’s content assigned to make finding information easier." See also: Controlled vocabulary , Descriptors .

Thesaurus: "A list of terms which serves as a standardized or controlled vocabulary for identifying, locating, and retrieving information." (Definition from New York Public Library ) 

Thumb drive: "A small portable device for storing computerized information. A thumb drive can plug into the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port of any computer and store electronic information."

Title: "The name of a book, article, or other information source."

Upload: "To transfer information from a computer system or a personal computer to another computer system or a larger computer system."

U niform R esource L ocator (URL) : "The unique address for a Web page which is used in citing it. A URL consists of the access protocol (http), the domain name (www.nmsu.edu), and often the path to a file or resource residing on that server."

User ID: "A number or name unique to a particular user of computerized resources. A user ID must often be entered in order to access library resources remotely."

Virtual reference: "A service allowing library users to ask questions through email or live-chat as opposed to coming to the reference desk at the library and asking a question in person. Also referred to as “online reference” or “e-reference.”

Wireless: "The name given to any electronic device that sends messages through space via electric or electromagnetic waves instead of via power cords."

World Wide Web: "A network of information, as a part of the Internet, that includes text, graphics, sounds, and moving images. Also know as the Web or WWW or W3. It incorporates a variety of Internet tools into one method of access, such as the Web browser Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox."

Zip drive/zip disk: "Devices used in the creation of compressed (or “zipped”) electronic information."

Multilingual Library Terms

Resources retrieved from  ACRL's Instruction Section Multilingual Glossary for Today's Library Users

Multilingual Glossary Language Table  

Multilingual Glossary Definitions

New South Wales State Library Multilingual Glossary  database is a professionally generated signage tool designed for libraries by the Library of New South Wales. It contains common library phrases in 49 languages.

Further Reading

Dictionary for library and information science

ALA glossary of library and information science

LibrarySpeak: A glossary of terms in librarianship and information management

Harrod's librarians' glossary and reference book

Christal Young, Librarian

• Last Updated: Sep 22, 2022 11:20 AM
• URL: https://libguides.usc.edu/libraryterms

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• J Korean Med Sci
• v.31(5); 2016 May

Specialist Bibliographic Databases

Armen yuri gasparyan.

1 Departments of Rheumatology and Research and Development, Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust (Teaching Trust of the University of Birmingham, UK), Russells Hall Hospital, Dudley, West Midlands, UK.

Marlen Yessirkepov

2 Department of Biochemistry, Biology and Microbiology, South Kazakhstan State Pharmaceutical Academy, Shymkent, Kazakhstan.

Alexander A. Voronov

3 Department of Marketing and Trade Deals, Kuban State University, Krasnodar, Russian Federation.

Vladimir I. Trukhachev

4 Department of Technological Management, Stavropol State Agrarian University, Stavropol, Russian Federation.

Elena I. Kostyukova

5 Faculty of Accounting and Finance, Department of Accounting Management, Stavropol State Agrarian University, Stavropol, Russian Federation.

Alexey N. Gerasimov

6 Department of Statistics and Econometrics, Stavropol State Agrarian University, Stavropol, Russian Federation.

George D. Kitas

7 Arthritis Research UK Epidemiology Unit, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

Specialist bibliographic databases offer essential online tools for researchers and authors who work on specific subjects and perform comprehensive and systematic syntheses of evidence. This article presents examples of the established specialist databases, which may be of interest to those engaged in multidisciplinary science communication. Access to most specialist databases is through subscription schemes and membership in professional associations. Several aggregators of information and database vendors, such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest, facilitate advanced searches supported by specialist keyword thesauri. Searches of items through specialist databases are complementary to those through multidisciplinary research platforms, such as PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Familiarizing with the functional characteristics of biomedical and nonbiomedical bibliographic search tools is mandatory for researchers, authors, editors, and publishers. The database users are offered updates of the indexed journal lists, abstracts, author profiles, and links to other metadata. Editors and publishers may find particularly useful source selection criteria and apply for coverage of their peer-reviewed journals and grey literature sources. These criteria are aimed at accepting relevant sources with established editorial policies and quality controls.

SEARCHING FOR SPECIFIC SCHOLARLY INFORMATION

Searching through bibliographic databases and retrieving relevant sources are essential for writing articles in an unbiased and systematic way. Systematic searches are becoming prerequisites of scientific authors’ professional behavior in the current era of information deluge. Researchers and authors may improve their referencing and writing skills by securing access to reputable bibliographic databases, search platforms, directories, institutional repositories, and libraries. By cooperating with information facilitators, authors may advance their understanding of various search tools and be more selective with regards to a large amount of relevant available references ( 1 , 2 ).

Current search strategies depend on the scope of scholarly articles and covered subject categories. Evidence pointing to the most comprehensive and reliable databases for different disciplines is scarce. The guidance is largely based on empirical expert opinion and some of the recent analyses of search strategies presented in systematic reviews. The main principle of comprehensive searches is to avoid relying on any single, even highly reputable bibliographic database ( 3 , 4 ).

For most scientific, technical and medical disciplines, Scopus and Web of Science are often recommended as platforms for retrieving and analyzing quality items ( 5 ). Both are highly selective and well-organized multidisciplinary abstracting and citation-tracking databases characterized elsewhere ( 6 ). Google Scholar, the largest multidisciplinary platform, is frequently employed for initial searches by most authors, particularly for navigating to full-texts of journal articles and grey literature ( 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ). However, some experts are critical of the Google approach because of its low specificity for locating relevant primary sources ( 11 ) and its low functionality for structured systematic searches ( 12 ).

Given the limitations of multidisciplinary databases and platforms, systematic and comprehensive evidence syntheses are increasingly encompassing specialized bibliographic databases, which cover not just peer-reviewed sources, but also books, dissertations, technical documents, guidelines, and other grey literature items ( 13 , 14 ). MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library are often referred as the main biomedical evidence-based search options ( 15 , 16 ). However, the current trend of multi-, cross-disciplinary, and multicenter research necessitates referring to services of a wide variety of global specialist bibliographic databases.

With the growing list of databases also comes a tendency of referring to irrelevant, or even erroneous, information that reveals the lack of understanding of the functionality of search tools. As a prime example, Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) is sometimes listed in search strategies of reviews as a bibliographic search tool ( 17 , 18 ) although it is known as a whitelist of open-access journals with incomplete links to papers ( 19 ).

The aim of this article is to overview some of the specialist databases employed by authors in their evidence-based articles and targeted by journal editors with interest in specialized fields of science.

MAIN FEATURES OF SPECIALIST DATABASES

Specialist databases are predominantly subscription-based online products that serve academic interests of professionals working in their narrow fields of science. Most of these databases are launched by reputable professional associations, such as the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the American Economic Association (AEA), among others. To better serve the interests of their users, specialist databases aim at indexing not only journals, but also online books, conference proceedings, dissertations, patents, government documents, and other grey literature items. Comprehensive coverage is perhaps the main difference between specialist and multidisciplinary databases. In line with this, relevant articles from general, non-specialized sources are selectively covered by narrow-specialized databases, such as the Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography.

Citation-tracking is not available for most specialist databases since their main purpose, at least at present, is to distribute bibliographic information for professional communities. Although some of these communities are large enough for reliable citation analyses (e.g., chemical and economical societies), their professional databases are still developing and updating their coverage with delays. CitEc (Citations in Economics; http://citec.repec.org/ ) is a unique specialist endeavor with reliability depending on availability of reference lists and timely coverage of sources by related economic databases.

The main units of processed information at specialist databases are English-language titles, author names, affiliations, abstracts, and keywords. Reference lists are also scanned, but their format, language, and visibility are not scrutinized in a way the global citation-tracking databases require. Full-texts of articles are archived by counterparts of some databases (e.g., CINAHL Plus with Full Text ® ). To help retrieve relevant sources, the databases are usually integrated with advanced search engines and organized vocabularies of professional keywords (e.g., Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms, Engineering Index Thesaurus, GeoBase Subject Index). Some database vendors offer their own advanced search engines (e.g., EBSCOhost, ProQuest).

The main indexing criterion of specialist databases is relevance. Sources from all over the world are eligible for coverage. However, the selection of periodicals requires careful evaluation of the functionality of the journal websites, assigning of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), quality control models (peer review), ethical editorial policies, copyright licenses, readability of English abstracts, and other attributes of the ‘legitimate’ scholarly sources. Introducing strict selection criteria for most specialist indexing services is gaining importance at the current time of proliferation of ‘illegitimate’, or ‘predatory’, journals, which aim to legitimize their practices by getting expanded indexing status ( 20 ). Fortunately, some of the specialist databases introduced strict selection criteria to cover selectively highly relevant quality periodicals (e.g., PsycINFO ® ). Well organized databases display publicly their lists of journals ( Box 1 ), which give an impression of the scrutiny of the source evaluation and guide new source applicants.

Box 1. Features of highly functional specialist bibliographic databases

• Transparent indexing criteria
• Focus on specific subject categories and disciplines
• Expanded coverage of allied fields of science
• Displayed lists of core and selective collections of periodicals
• Availability of expert teams for evaluating new source applications
• English and/or multilingual platform
• Capacity to cover a range of items (articles, books, conference proceedings, theses, technical documents, audiovisual materials, web resources)
• Advanced online search engine
• Expanded coverage of historic publications
• Integration of search engine with an organized thesaurus of specialist keywords
• Availability at vendors’ platform (e.g., EBSCOhost, ProQuest)
• Integration with a digital archive or repository (full-text counterpart)

Chemical Abstracts Service ( https://www.cas.org/ )

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is the bibliographic database of the American Chemical Society (ACS), which is available for searches through the STN (Scientific & Technical Information Network) and SciFinder platforms. It is one of the oldest scholarly information services. CAS indexes historic papers dating back to 1907, when it started as a print collection of abstracts in chemistry entitled Chemical Abstracts TM . In 1956, the print index became a division of the ACS and changed its title to CAS.

The CAS database covers chemistry and most chemistry-related disciplines, such as biochemistry, immunochemistry, pharmacology, and toxicology. It produces the following constituent sections: CAS Registry, which lists more than 106 million organic and inorganic chemicals and more than 66 million sequences; CAplus – more than 42 million bibliographic records from the CAS core journals and patents coverage lists; CASREACT – more than 71.2 million single- and multi-step chemical reactions; CHEMCATS – information about suppliers of chemical substances; CHEMLIST – regulated chemicals listing; CIN – Chemical Industry Notes; and MARPAT – database of chemical substances listed in patents, with more than 1.1 million searchable Markush structures. All these products are searchable through the STN and SciFinder search engines.

Publishers interested in indexing their journals in CAS are advised to send first issues of their new periodicals or three recent issues of established ones to the Evaluation Department of the CAS headquarters in Columbus, State of Ohio, USA. Applications for online-only journals can be submitted through the online forms at: http://web.cas.org/forms/journalform.html .

The list of more than 1,500 core journals indexed by CAS is available at the CAplus SM website ( http://www.cas.org/content/references/corejournals ). The core coverage list includes Chemistry Reviews , one of the most authoritative sources in chemistry, British Journal of Pharmacology, Circulation Research, Immunology , Journal of the Korean Chemical Society , and many other periodicals of national chemistry associations.

Researchers, who are interested in analyzing drug interactions, supplement MEDLINE, TOXLINE, and EMBASE searches with those through the CAS databases ( 21 ). Searches through CAS can be particularly helpful for retrieving information about new drugs and drug development ( 22 , 23 ).

PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY & NEUROLOGY

Psycinfo ® ( http://apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/index.aspx ).

PsycINFO ® is a highly selective, evidence-based bibliographic database in the field of psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and behavioral sciences. It is maintained by the American Psychological Association (APA). Subscription access to the database is available through the APA PsycNet platform and third-party vendors (DIMDI [ http://www.dimdi.de ], EBSCOhost, OVID, ProQuest, ProQuest Dialog).

The database has strict selection criteria. These include, but are not limited to relevance, international scope, predominantly original and evidence-based contents, informative metadata, meticulous peer review, diversity of reviewers and authors, and archiving policy ( http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/publishers/journals.aspx ). Currently, the list of indexed journals includes 2,568 sources ( http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/coverage.aspx ). Examples of the listed journals are Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience, Clinical Rehabilitation, The Lancet, The Lancet Neurology, and Psychology in Russia: State of the Art . More than 110 journals, published by APA and affiliated organizations, are currently catalogued by PsycARTICLES ® , the full-text counterpart of PsycINFO ® ( http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycarticles/coverage-list.aspx ).

The preferential coverage of quality and evidence-based literature allowed the recommendation of PsycINFO, along with MEDLINE, The Cochrane Library, EMBASE and CINAHL, as the best platforms for retrieving references for practice guidelines ( 24 ). Moreover, an analysis of Romanian mental health literature, published in English from 2000 to 2008, distinguished PsycINFO as the most comprehensive indexing database in the field, with 3,236 items retrieved from PsycINFO compared to 549 - by MEDLINE, and 139 - by EMBASE ( 25 ). Finally, PsycINFO is often employed for searches of trials and other evidence-based items at the interface of psychology, neurology, and other clinical disciplines ( 26 , 27 ).

NURSING & CARING SCIENCES

Cumulative index to nursing and allied health literature ( https://www.ebscohost.com/nursing/products/cinahl-databases/the-cinahl-database ).

Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL ® ) is the main database of nursing literature, which is managed by EBSCO Publishing and exclusively available on the EBSCOhost platform. It indexes publications of the National League for Nursing (USA), the American Nurses Association (USA), other English sources, and some relevant periodicals in other languages of interest to nurses, nurse educators, and students. More than 3,100 journals are currently indexed by CINAHL ( https://www.ebscohost.com/titleLists/cin-coverage.pdf ). Additionally, the database offers access to healthcare books, nursing dissertations, conference proceedings, and standards of care. CINAHL along with MEDLINE, Science Citation Index, and Social Science Citation Index are highly recommended databases for searching and synthesizing information in nursing and caring science ( 28 , 29 ). Bibliographic services related to CINAHL are CINAHL Plus, CINAHL Plus with Full Text, CINAHL Complete, and Nursing Reference Center.

CINAHL Plus with Full Text ® ( https://www.ebscohost.com/academic/cinahl-plus-with-full-text ) is a full-text counterpart of CINAHL. It covers journals, magazines, trade publications, and government documents in their entirety or selectively ( https://www.ebscohost.com/titleLists/rzh-coverage.pdf ). Indexed periodicals relate to health & medicine, social sciences & humanities, communication, education, religion & philosophy, business, technology, and other subject categories. Full texts of 736 indexed journals are available immediately after publication or with 12-18 months embargo ( https://www.ebscohost.com/titleLists/rzh-subject.pdf ). The database also indexes nursing dissertations, conference proceedings, full-texts of 133 evidence-based care sheets, 10 books/monographs, and selected book chapters. Advanced search engine is linked to the CINAHL Subject Headings thesaurus.

British Nursing Index ( http://www.proquest.co.uk/go/bni )

British Nursing Index (BNI) is a smaller database covering more than 700 peer-reviewed British and international journals plus trade magazines and dissertations of interest to nurses, midwifes, and community health professionals ( http://www.proquest.com/documents/Title_List_-_British_Nursing_Index.html ). The coverage spans from 1985 to the present time. More than 150 influential journals, including 50 British sources, are uniquely indexed by BNI compared to CINAHL ( 30 ).

BNI-indexed journals are mostly published in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The British Journal of Nursing, Iranian Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Research, Musculoskeletal Care, and Nursing Ethics are examples of sources in the core collection of BNI. Papers from allied health, medical, and managerial periodicals are indexed selectively. The Lancet and BMJ are prime examples of the selectively covered sources. The main database is now accompanied by its full-text counterpart, the British Nursing Index with Full Text. ProQuest accommodates both databases.

Searches through BNI are often employed to complement those by CINAHL, and particularly for processing information on British nursing and community research ( 31 , 32 ).

INJURIES& SAFETY

Safetylit ( http://www.safetylit.org/ ).

SafetyLit (Safety Literature) is a free updating and archiving service for researchers seeking peer-reviewed sources on injury prevention, safety promotion, environmental health, and healthcare. It is a project of the SafetyLit Foundation, San Diego State University College of Health and Human Services, and Department of Violence and Injury Prevention of the World Health Organization.

In the early 1990s, SafetyLit was an electronic updating service distributing abstracts from MEDLINE to a small group of correspondents. With the growing submission of abstracts from large publishers and expanding the mailing list from merely 20 in 1995 to more than 15,000 in 1999, the need to transform services from distributing newsletters ( SafetyLit Weekly Update Bulletin ) to providing advanced bibliographic searches through a website became apparent, and SafetyLit was established as a database in 2001. “Preventing injuries by providing information” is the motto of the service.

Emergency medicine, sports medicine, orthopedics, traumatology, and rheumatology sources are preferentially covered by the database. Indexed sources include more than 16,000 journals in the physical sciences, social sciences, engineering biology, and medicine ( http://www.safetylit.org/week/journals.php ). The database is still open to new journal applications in the field of injury prevention and safety promotion ( http://www.safetylit.org/definitions.htm ). From 2013, the database started accepting doctoral theses covering the issue of safety.

The SafetyLit database contains information about more than 488,000 journal articles, 25,000 books, doctoral theses, and technical reports ( http://www.safetylit.org/statistics.htm ). Searches through the database are employed for narrative and systematic reviews of injury prevention and safety promotion ( 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ). Advanced searches are supported by the SafetyLit Thesaurus, which is a hierarchy of anatomical terms, diseases and disorders, chemicals and drugs, food and beverages, information and communication, technology and industry, traffic characteristics, etc. New concepts and terms are added to the thesaurus regularly.

SPORTS, PHYSICAL MEDICINE & REHABILITATION

Sportdiscus tm ( https://www.ebscohost.com/academic/sportdiscus ).

SPORTDiscus TM is the most comprehensive bibliographic database that covers sports, sports rehabilitation, physical therapy and education, biomechanics, exercise physiology, occupational therapy, public health, nutrition, sport and exercise psychology, and more. It is produced by EBSCO Publishing, and covers more than 2 million records from journals, theses, conference proceedings, books, and book chapters. Coverage of some sources is going back to 1800. Contents are compiled by the Sport Information Research Centre (Ottawa, Canada; http://sirc.ca/ ), and inquiries about journal coverage can be emailed to [email protected]. Searches through SPORTDiscus are available through the EBSCOhost interface, supported by the Sports Thesaurus.

Search strategies of recent systematic reviews in sports medicine, exercise physiology, orthopedics, podiatry, and allied subjects often include MEDLINE and SPORTDiscus ( 37 , 38 , 39 ). Also, SPORTDiscus indexes core literature in physical education ( 40 ).

SPORTDiscus with Full Text ( https://health.ebsco.com/products/sportdiscus-with-full-text ) provides access to full-texts of more than 1,300 peer-reviewed journals, magazines, video reports, dissertations, and books ( https://www.ebscohost.com/titleLists/s4h-coverage.pdf ). Examples of the indexed journals are the Archives of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, British Journal of Health Psychology , British Journal of Sports Medicine , Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases , and Korean Journal of Sports Medicine .

Physiotherapy Evidence Database ( http://www.pedro.org.au/ )

Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) is a freely available bibliographic database of more than 32,000 randomized trials, systematic reviews of clinical trials, and practice guidelines in physiotherapy published in English periodicals. It was established in 1999, and is maintained by the Centre for Evidence-Based Physiotherapy at the Musculoskeletal Division of the George Institute for Global Health (Sydney, Australia). As an initiative to distribute comprehensive information on the best available evidence in physiotherapy, it has a methodological quality ranking system of trials from 1/10 to 9/10 (the PEDro scale) and separate search portals for professionals and consumers of services ( 41 ). The database’s bibliographic records have been assembled from searches through MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and the Cochrane Clinical Trials Register.

An analysis of trials indexed by PEDro helped distinguish the top 5 core journals publishing the best available evidence on the effects of physical therapy: Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Clinical Rehabilitation, Spine, BMJ, and Chest ( 42 ). Searches through the database are also employed in systematic reviews of disability, exercise therapy, and rehabilitation of patients with musculoskeletal disorders ( 43 , 44 , 45 ).

CIRRIE Database of International Rehabilitation Research ( http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/database/ )

The Center for International Rehabilitation Research Information & Exchange (CIRRIE) Database is a free platform for retrieving rehabilitation-related information on research conducted outside the USA. The database is produced by the School of Public Health and Health Professions of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. It contains more than 165,000 records of international articles published from 1990 onward.

The searches are supported by the CIRRIE Thesaurus terms ( http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/database/thesaurus/ ). Separate options are available for retrieving author profiles and links to the 25 most cited in Web of Science articles in various subject headings. The “arthritis” section, for example, lists articles published in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, Physical Therapy, and other influential rehabilitation, orthopedics, and rheumatology journals. The complete list of covered journals is presented in alphabetical order at: http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/database/journals/ . Editors and publishers interested in supplying bibliographic information to the CIRRIE may contact the information manager at: http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/contact/ .

The CIRRIE Database of International Research is a companion to REHABDATA, which is produced by the National Rehabilitation Information (USA) as a database of rehabilitation research conducted in the United States ( 46 ). More than 80,000 items published from 1956 to the present are abstracted by REHABDATA ( http://www.naric.com/?q=en/REHABDATA ). Both rehabilitation databases, along with MEDLINE and CINAHL, comprehensively index current research on disabilities and rehabilitation. The retrieval of full-texts is currently available for some articles, which are indexed by REHABDATA.

GLOBAL HEALTH, AGRICULTURE, VETERINARY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Cab abstracts and global health ( www.cabdirect.org/ ).

The Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI, formerly known as the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, UK) is an information provider that focuses on agricultural and environmental issues in the developing world. CABI is an official supporting organization of the Healthcare Information For All (HIFA), a global campaign aimed at improving the availability of healthcare information in low-income countries. The publishing division of CABI hosts two large bibliographic databases on its CAB Direct platform – CAB Abstracts and Global Health. Searches through these databases are supported by the CAB Thesaurus, which lists more than 250,000 descriptive terms related to agriculture, forestry, soil science, mycology, parasitology, veterinary medicine, environmental health, food science & nutrition, medicinal plants, pharmacology, and other branches of the applied life sciences.

CAB Abstracts is the most comprehensive database in the applied life sciences. Searches through the database are recommended for systematic evidence-based analyses in veterinary medicine, since 90% of the currently active journals with significant veterinary content are covered by CAB Abstracts ( 47 ). The database gives access to more than 8.1 million scientific records from 1973 onward. Relevant records are selected from more than 8,000 serials, books, and conference proceedings. Bulletins, newsletters, theses, handbooks, position statements, and other types of grey literature are also extensively covered. More than 220,000 full-texts of scholarly articles indexed by CAB Abstracts are currently available through the CABI Full Text repository.

Online applications for indexing are encouraged through the following links: http://www.cabi.org/publishing-products/submit-journal or [email protected].

Applications are evaluated monthly on the basis of relevance, geographic origin, and potential yield ( http://www.cabi.org/Uploads/CABI/publishing/authors/cabi-life-science-journal-submission.pdf ).

Global Health is the most reputed public health database, which contains more than 2.6 million records from 1973 onward. It is the most comprehensive reference for experts in sanitation, hygiene, tropical health, food safety, and health promotion. The database indexes full-texts of more than 64,000 journal articles and grey literature items. Furthermore, Global Health Archive contains more than 800,000 records from six printed abstract journals of CABI dating from 1910 to 1983. Covered biomedical disciplines are toxicology, pharmacology, microbiology, epidemiology, tropical medicine, and occupational & environmental health. The journal application platform is the same as for CAB Abstracts.

CABI abstracts of indexed items are distributed to narrow-specialized abstracting databases, such as the Abstracts on Hygiene & Communicable Diseases, Helminthological Abstracts, Parasitology Database, Nutrition & Food Sciences Database, and Tropical Disease Bulletin. These products of CABI are delivered on the CAB Direct and other platforms.

AGRICOLA ( http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/ )

AGRICOLA (AGRICultural OnLine Access) is the largest database of agricultural literature. It indexes collections of the National Agricultural Library (NAL, US), which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Collections include online journal articles, books, theses, audiovisual materials, and historic sources, some of which date back to the 15 th century. Subjects cover agriculture, veterinary sciences, entomology, parasitology, agricultural biology and economics, food & nutrition, plants & crops, marketing & trade, earth & environmental sciences, and rural & community development.

AGRICOLA consists of the public section (NAL Public Access Catalog) and subscription-based abstracting service (Article Citation Database). The NAL platform, EBSCOhost, and ProQuest incorporate searches through the AGRICOLA bibliographic database. The PubAg search engine was launched in January 2015 to facilitate free retrieval of full-text journal articles, which are authored by researchers of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and to search global agricultural items ( http://pubag.nal.usda.gov/pubag/home.xhtml ). PubAg already indexes more than 42,000 full-text journal articles and records more than 1 million global agricultural items. The retrieval of relevant items through PubAg is supported by the NAL Agricultural Thesaurus terms. There are more than 120,000 terms listed by the Thesaurus for 17 agriculture-related subject categories ( http://agclass.nal.usda.gov/ ). A full-text counterpart of AGRICOLA is offered to subscribers by the ProQuest Agricultural Science Collection.

Searches through the AGRICOLA database have been employed for synthesizing evidence on environmental contaminants in food, alternative and herbal medicines, probiotics, and antihelmintic drugs ( 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ).

AGRICOLA accepts for coverage relevant peer-reviewed digitized journals with English titles, abstracts, and full bibliographic information ( http://www.nal.usda.gov/faq-how-to-get-journal-indexed-in-agricola ). Indexers give preference to English sources, but items in Western European, Slavic, Asian, and African languages are also accepted. Inquiries about indexing new journals and other sources can be submitted via the NAL platform ( http://www.nal.usda.gov/ask-question ) or emailed to: [email protected].

AGRIS ( http://agris.fao.org )

AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) is a global agricultural bibliographic database, repository, and collaborative network of more than 150 institutions from 65 countries. Along with AGRICOLA and CAB Abstracts, it is regarded as the leading bibliographic database that increases the accessibility of agricultural research data and international visibility of related publications from developing countries ( 53 ). It was set up as an initiative by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1974 ( 54 ). It is now a part of the CIARD (Open Agriculture Knowledge for Development) initiative. The mission of AGRIS is to improve the accessibility of agricultural information worldwide. The database’s search engine is enhanced by the AGROVOC (a portmanteau of AGRiculture and VOCabulary) multilingual thesaurus that lists more than 40,000 terms in 23 languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Persian, and Russian. AGRIS contains more than 7.5 million records from journal articles, monographs, conference papers, technical reports, and dissertations in a wide range of subject categories related to economics, animal and plant production, food science, human nutrition, occupational diseases and hazards, and many other areas of agricultural research (AGRIS Subject Categories; http://www.fao.org/scripts/agris/c-categ.htm ). Journal editors may apply for indexing at: http://www.akstem.com/agris .

Food Science and Technology Abstracts ( http://foodinfo.ifis.org/fsta )

Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA) is an abstracting database produced by the IFIS Publishing (International Food Information Service, UK). It covers a range of issues related to food, beverages and nutrition technologies, food safety, effects of food ingredients on health, etc. IFIS developed its own thesaurus of more than 10,700 food-related keywords that systematize searches through FSTA. More than 1,020 active journals are currently indexed by FSTA. The list of covered journals and information about indexing new sources can be received upon request from: http://foodinfo.ifis.org/contact-us . The FSTA database, alongside AGRIS, AGRICOLA and CABI, is often listed in search strategies of systematic reviews of the effects of food constituents on health and diseases, food microbial contamination, and related issues ( 55 , 56 , 57 ).

EconLit ( https://www.aeaweb.org/econlit/ )

EconLit (Economic Literature) is the most comprehensive and well-organized subscription database of abstracts in the field of economics. It is maintained by the American Economic Association (AEA), and accessed on the Association’s website. EBSCOhost, ProQuest, and OVID also offer access to the database. More than 1,000 peer-reviewed English and non-English journals are indexed by EconLit ( https://www.aeaweb.org/econlit/journal_list.php ). All indexed items are tagged with the JEL ( Journal of Economic Literature ) Classification Codes, which were introduced to assign alphabetically listed subject categories from A – General Economics and Teaching, to I – Health, Education, Welfare, and Z – Other Special Topics ( https://www.aeaweb.org/jel/guide/jel.php ). Searches through the EconLit database are employed in systematic reviews on economic evaluations ( 58 , 59 , 60 ). Applications for indexing relevant journals, books, and dissertations can be sent to [email protected] and [email protected] ( https://www.aeaweb.org/jel/ ).

EconLit with Full Text is a full-text counterpart of the main database, which is available on EBSCOhost. It archives more than 680 full-text journals and 16 books on capital markets, econometrics, environmental economics, agricultural economics, health economics, etc. Examples of the archived sources are the Journal of Economic Literature , American Economic Review , Journal of the Korean Economy , Russian Economic Trends , Health Economics , Health Care Management Science , and PharmacoEconomics .

The EconLit database is enhanced by preprints and other archival items in economics received from RePEc (Research Papers in Economics). RePEc ( http://repec.org/ ) is a voluntary service for researchers in economics and related scientific fields. More than 2 million journal articles, book chapters, and working papers archived by RePEc can be browsed and retrieved through the IDEAS platform. RePEc is maintained by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (USA), offering its search engine - IDEAS. Most large publishers, including Springer and Elsevier, submitted their collections in economics to RePEc. Academic and research departments from all over the world also contribute to RePEc, which has now access to more than 1,100 archives. Access to a large collection of working papers, journal articles, books, and software in economics is also available through the EconPapers platform ( http://econpapers.repec.org/ ), a part of RePEc hosted by of the Örebro University Business School.

Interestingly, reference lists of the RePEc large archive and citing sources are currently processed by its CitEc service, or Citations in Economics project ( http://citec.repec.org/ ). Citation data are available from 2001 onward. Although it is a unique service for a specialist bibliographic database, the reliability of the calculated citation indices is questionable since not all indexed items have reference lists and their availability is subjected to uncontrolled submissions by users (i.e., individual authors, departments, publishers).

ENGINEERING SCIENCES

Ei compendex ( http://www.engineeringvillage.com/ ).

Ei Compendex (Engineering Index COMPuterized Engineering inDEX) is the flagship engineering database, which is currently published by Elsevier, and is searchable on the Engineering Village platform. Historic publications are covered back to 1884. Major engineering fields are covered, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, food science and technology, engineering materials and technologies, and medical devices. The Engineering Village platform, integrated with Scopus, enables searches through Compendex and 11 other engineering databases, such as GeoBase, Inspec, and GeoRef. The platform displays citation details and author profiles of the indexed items. The strict indexing criteria for Compendex are transparently presented by Elsevier ( https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/engineering-village/content/selection-criteria ). Relevant publications should meet a combination of qualitative and quantitative criteria to be eligible for indexing. These include original and validated content contributing to the engineering, quality website, transparent editorial and peer review policy, geographical diversity of editors and authors, informative and readable English abstracts, references in Roman script, citedness of journal articles, digital archiving policy, etc. The list of indexed journals and other serials (>4,800) include Acta Informatica, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnologies, Materials Science, Sports Engineering ( https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/engineering-village/content#databases ). Suggestions of new journals and conference proceedings for indexing by Ei Compendex and GeoBase are processed through the Elsevier platform at: www.engineeringvillage.com/title-suggestion . Current reviews of innovative health care and rehabilitation technologies often include searches through Ei Compendex ( 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 ).

GEOLOGY & EARTH SCIENCES

Geobase ( http://www.engineeringvillage.com/ ).

GeoBase is another engineering database, which is published by Elsevier and presented on the Engineering Village platform. It indexes more than 2.8 million bibliographic records on earth and environmental sciences, alternative energy sources, ecology, pollution, and human geography. Subsets of GeoBase are 7 print abstract journals, such as Ecological Abstracts, Geographical Abstracts, and Geological Abstracts. Items of interest to geoscientists are tagged with terms from the GeoTree thesaurus. More than 2,100 peer-reviewed are indexed by GeoBase ( https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/engineering-village/content#id03 ). These include Journal of Environmental Health, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Russian Journal of Ecology, Nature, and Science . Representative reviews with searches through GeoBase relate to environmental health, meteorology, housing, and socio-economic conditions ( 65 , 66 , 67 ).

GeoRef ( www.americangeosciences.org/georef )

GeoRef is a global specialist database of the American Geosciences Institute, which covers geology, geophysics, environmental geology, hydrogeology, and engineering geology. Issues related to climate change, earthquakes, tsunamis, and natural disasters are well represented at the database. Searches through GeoRef are supported by the GeoRef Thesaurus and are available on Engineering Village and through several vendors (e.g., EBSCOhost, ProQuest, OVID). The database indexes more than 3.7 million records from journals, books, theses, conference papers, maps, and reports of the U.S. Geological Survey. The list of more than 2,500 indexed journals ( http://www.americangeosciences.org/georef/serials-list ) includes the International Journal of Circumpolar Health, Korean Journal of Hydrosciences, Nature, and Science . The new journal applications are regularly evaluated by the GeoRef Advisory Committee ([email protected]). Biomedical reviews of issues at the interface of environmental science and epidemiology may employ searches through GeoRef ( 68 ).

PHYSICS, ELECTRONICS & COMPUTER SCIENCES

Information services for physics, electronics, and computing ( http://www.theiet.org/resources/inspec/ ).

Information Services for Physics, Electronics, and Computing (Inspec) is a bibliographic database of abstracts in physics, technology, and engineering, which covers more than 15 million records in electrical engineering, geophysics, astronomy, acoustics, computer science, informatics, nanotechnology, environmental science, healthcare technology, and bioinformatics. It is published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET, UK), which offers searches through its InspecDirect platform. Searches are supported by the Inspec Thesaurus and Classification scheme that lists more than 9,800 specialized terms.

The selection preference is given to English sources, but non-English journals with readable English titles, abstracts, and references in Roman script are also accepted for coverage. Numerous bulletins of prestigious academies, engineering and technology universities of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, Korea, and Japan are represented in the updated journal list of the database ( http://www.theiet.org/resources/inspec/support/docs/index.cfm ). Biomedical journals focusing on radiology, nuclear medicine, physical rehabilitation, biomaterials, nanotechnologies, and informatics are also covered. Selected video items of reputable organizations are now a part of the Inspec database. Suggestions of potentially valuable new additions to the database can be sent to [email protected]. Inspec and Compendex have been employed in systematic searches of electronic and electromechanical devices used in medicine ( 69 , 70 , 71 ).

Education Resources Information Center ( http://eric.ed.gov/ )

Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is the largest bibliographic database and full-text digital library in the field of education, which is administered by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance of the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. It covers American and other English peer-reviewed journals, as well as grey literature directly related to education research. More than 600 peer-reviewed journals are covered comprehensively, selectively, or occasionally. Academic journals at the interface of several disciplines are variably represented at the database. For example, two studies of resources in health education pointed to the fact that MEDLINE and Scopus offer the most comprehensive coverage in the field while ERIC – the least comprehensive ( 72 , 73 ). In January 2016, ERIC publicized its updated selection policy, where indexing of highly relevant, peer-reviewed sources in education research with available full-texts was prioritized ( http://eric.ed.gov/pdf/ERIC_Selection_Policy.pdf ). Full list of the indexed journals is posted on the database’s website ( http://eric.ed.gov/?journals ). The list includes the Health Education , Rehabilitation Research, Policy, and Education , and other biomedical periodicals. Access to the ERIC database is available through several vendors, including EBSCOhost and ProQuest. The latter also offers the full-text counterpart of the database – ERIC PlusText, which incorporates the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors and full-texts of articles from ProQuest Education Journals TM .

Searches through the ERIC databases have been employed in systematic reviews of mental health, disabilities, and medical education issues ( 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 ). Several other databases are also recommended for those seeking professional information on education: the British Education Index ( https://www.ebscohost.com/academic/the-british-education-index ), Current Education & Children’s Services Research (CERUK; http://www.ceruk.ac.uk/ ), Australian Education Index (AEI; https://www.acer.edu.au/library/australian-education-index-aei ), and Teacher Reference Center ( www.teacherreference.com ).

LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCES

The landmark analysis of 2,625 items, published between 1982 and 2002 by American specialists, showed that there are 10 specialist and multidisciplinary databases that provide significant coverage of essential sources in the library & information sciences ( 78 ). Of these databases, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Library Literature & Information Science (LLIS), Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), Information Science & Technology Abstracts (ISTA), PASCAL, Inspec, and ERIC covered most items in the field. It was suggested to search through at least four databases to have comprehensive synthesis of the literature in related articles.

Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts

Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) is a database of abstracts in the fields of librarianship, information management, bibliometrics, etc. It is published by EBSCO Publishing and available for free searches on the EBSCOhost platform ( www.libraryresearch.com ). LISTA offers author profiles and other bibliographic information from more than 580 core journals, 50 priority journals, and 120 selective journals since the mid-1960s ( https://www.ebscohost.com/titleLists/lxh-coverage.pdf ). The list of journals includes the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Informatics for Health & Social Care, Medical Reference Services Quarterly, and Scientometrics . Full-texts of more than 330 journals are currently available from LISTA with Full Text, yet another product of EBSCO Publishing.

Library and Information Science Abstracts

Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) is a database for information facilitators, which is available on ProQuest ( http://www.proquest.com/products-services/lisa-set-c.html ). Its selection criteria are oriented toward accepting relevant peer-reviewed sources fulfilling quality publishing standards ( http://proquest.libguides.com/lisa ). Priority is given to journals covering emerging fields of science, such as distance learning. More than 440 active journals are currently indexed by LISA, including the Health Information & Libraries Journal , Journal of the Medical Library Association , Journal of Information Ethics , and Scientometrics ( http://www.proquest.com/documents/Title_List_-_Library_and_Information_Science_Abstracts.html ). Searches through the LISA database have been employed in reviews of reference management and electronic health information ( 79 , 80 ).

Bibliographic databases are universal tools for research at all stages of continuing professional development. Researchers and authors familiarizing with the functionality and resources of multidisciplinary and specialist databases increase their chances of systematic and comprehensive searches for writing articles, dissertations, practice guidelines, and other scholarly documents. Examples of online specialist databases are presented in Table 1 . By regularly accessing the lists of journals at databases of interest, specialists delve into the journal ranking and evidence accumulation. Research managers and journal editors may guide them by recommending or providing access to the most relevant and user-friendly databases and research platforms ( 81 ). The selectivity is required when institutional subscription to the services of EBSCO Publishing, ProQuest, and other large vendors of bibliographic databases and content aggregators is discussed.

Publicly available databases and platforms, such as MEDLINE/PubMed and Google Scholar, are widely employed by researchers. However, many subscription databases contain additional information, not available elsewhere, which may add to the diversity of cited references. Current research is increasingly multidisciplinary and multicenter, requiring access to various specialist sources. As such, searches through multiple databases can be viewed as the golden rule for research and systematic synthesis of evidence.

One of the principles of relevant referencing justifies reading not just retrieved abstracts, but also full-texts ( 1 ). In keeping with that principle and as a good service to the users, some multidisciplinary databases offer links to publicly available or subscription archives of full-texts (e.g., PubMed to the PubMed Central repository, Scopus to the ScienceDirect library). Many specialist databases have also launched full-text counterparts of their abstracting databases to enhance the functionality of their services (e.g., CINAHL Plus with Full Text, PsycARTICLES).

Most, if not all, specialist databases are produced and maintained by large professional societies and academic institutions that evaluate and select scholarly items. Although their declared selection criteria are strict, not all the databases build up their catalogs with quality peer-reviewed sources. The nonselective approach opens gates for ‘predatory’ journals that abuse their indexing status and publish large amounts of poorly edited or unchecked articles. Apparently, current authors need additional tools for judging the ‘quality’ of the retrieved bibliographic information. Scopus, for example, introduced an option to notify the users about listing of open-access periodicals by DOAJ and opted for delisting indexed sources failing to meet the selection criteria. The PEDro database employed the methodological quality ranking system of trials to inform about ‘power’ of evidence of the indexed items. But most specialist databases still lack similar tools and policies to mark and delist low quality and poorly validated periodicals.

Citation-tracking is not a priority for specialist databases, especially for small ones and those indexing peer-reviewed along with nonreviewed and grey literature references. Nonetheless, the example of ranking highly-cited articles by the CIRRIE International Rehabilitation Database, processing citations from the Web of Science database, may be a precedent for other specialist databases with growing reference coverage.

Editors and publishers, who aim to increase visibility and citability of their journals, continuously target various specialist databases, full-text repositories, and scholarly networking platforms ( 82 ). The implications of such a tactic are two-fold – better visibility of the authors and enhanced contents of the databases. Even journals that are already tracked by prestigious global databases, such as MEDLINE and Scopus, may benefit from additional, core-content or selective indexing by specialist databases. General medical journals, for example, may choose to apply for indexing by economic or agricultural databases if relevant items are part of their declared scope of interests.

Despite the availability of a number of specialist databases, many emerging scientific fields still remain uncovered. Professional information distributed by current databases is mostly intended for researchers, research managers, information facilitators, and students while interests of nonprofessional users, and particularly patients, are too often overlooked. PEDro is perhaps the only specialist database that offer search options for professionals and consumers of health services. The discussed challenges make obvious the requirement for more efforts and investments to expand the scope of the current and/or create new international and regional bibliographic services.

DISCLOSURE: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION: Data collection: Gasparyan AY, Yessirkepov M, Voronov AA, Trukhachev VI, Kostyukova EI, Gerasimov AN, Kitas GD. Data Interpretation: Gasparyan AY, Yessirkepov M, Voronov AA, Trukhachev VI, Kostyukova EI, Gerasimov AN, Kitas GD. Manuscript drafting: Gasparyan AY, Yessirkepov M, Voronov AA, Trukhachev VI, Kostyukova EI, Gerasimov AN, Kitas GD. Approval of final manuscript: all authors.