A wide spectrum of rigor exists in systematic literature review methods. This article argues review methods should include both a preliminary discussion justifying where and a secondary protocol explaining how a literature search is conducted. Journal title overlap analysis is one way to justify where a literature search is conducted. A new…

This research identifies the similarities and differences between the MathSciNet search features and functions of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and EBSCOhost platforms. A series of iterative MathSciNet queries were performed on both platforms. For each query, the total number of results and search behavior were documented and analyzed.…

This article provides an overview of national bibliographic databases that include data on research output within social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Europe. We focus on the comprehensiveness of the database content. Compared to the data from commercial databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, data from national bibliographic databases…

This article presents the results of a study of academic e-books that compared the metadata and search results from major academic e-book platforms. The authors collected data and performed a series of test searches designed to produce the same result regardless of platform. Testing, however, revealed metadata-related errors and significant…

Agricultural researchers and science librarians must understand which research literature databases provide the most comprehensive coverage of agricultural subjects to support their inquiries. Once the domain of a few specialized databases, agricultural research literature is now covered by broad, multidisciplinary databases. The purpose of this…

This commentary begins by summarizing the five contributions to this special issue and briefly recapping the background to the topic of student learning in higher education. Narrative and systematic reviews are compared, and the relative value of different bibliographic databases in the context of systematic reviews is assessed. The importance of…