Unearthing Archaeology: A Study of the Recent Coverage of Selected English-Language Archaeology Journals by Multi-Subject Indexes and byAnthropological Literature

Abstract

Librarians, faculty, and professional researchers, and students already encounter difficulties in locating journal articles for the field of archaeology, yet, in the current budgetary climate, librarians needing to reduce subscription costs may be tempted to cancel smaller, discipline-specific indexes in favor of large multisubject indexes with broad coverage. This study examines and compares the coverage provided to 208 archaeology and archaeologyrelated journals and magazines by six multi-subject indexes and by anthropology's primary index, Anthropological Literature, over a twenty year period (1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007).

Sanctioned Inequity and Accessibility Issues in the Grey Literature in the United States

“…Studies have shown that without this aspect of archaeological-network knowledge the rate of recall for current, relevant, and primary sources of archaeological information resources is low (Alberani and De Castro 2001;Kotter 2002;Seely 2005:7;Tyler et al 2009). Many times those outside these networks do not actively seek these resources themselves because they lack knowledge of how to navigate within the complex associations that comprise these grey communities, although this situation is improving with the dedicated work of information and library science specialists.…”

“…Accessibility is no longer mostly about technical access barriers, per se, because many solutions are being provided via the Internet and new indexing systems (for a few examples, see Archaeological Institute of America 2009;Jarvis 1999;Aitchison 2009;Falkingham 2005;Hardman 2009;Kansa this volume;Kotter 2002;Nardi et al 2004;NPS 2009;SAA 2009;Seely 2005;Stock and Sampité 2009;tDAR 2009;Tyler et al 2009). 3 Concomitantly, access is now productively viewed as a problem related to a way of thinking, understanding, and it is an attitude (Aitchison this volume;Seymour 2009a, b;Harlan this volume).…”

“…Yet, reciprocally, the same access problem pertains to contract archaeologists who must access academic networks to locate the most current treatments of a subject. It is difficult enough to identify all relevant journal articles and books referenced in established indices, and admittedly it is even more difficult to find limited-distribution reports that would be best accesses by narrow subdiscipline-specific indexes (also see Tyler et al 2009). Still, practically speaking, the expectation of a single centrally deposited source of information is not even met by scholastic journal outlets, which place pass codes on access portals connected to universities, effectively excluding most non-academics.…”

Search tools and scholarly citation practices in literary studies

“…Some have also evaluated web-scale discovery against subject databases in the context of finding information in a particular discipline, often asking if the specificity of a subject database offered advantages over multi-subject databases or web-scale discovery. In terms of coverage of relevant literature, several studies have found that Google Scholar exceeds the standard subject databases in fields such as communication (Tyler et al, 2005(Tyler et al, , 2008, geography (S ¸tirbu et al, 2015), and history (Pearce, 2019), whereas subject databases had superior coverage for archaeology (Tyler et al, 2009). Many of these studies assume a correlation between extent of coverage and usefulness, whereas others appreciate that certain search features might make the subject databases preferable in chemistry (Levine-Clark and Kraus, 2007), health sciences (Bramer et al, 2013), social sciences (Dahlen and Hanson, 2017), or specific purposes such as systematic reviews (Bates et al, 2017;Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020).…”

“…, 2005, 2008), geography (Ştirbu et al. , 2015), and history (Pearce, 2019), whereas subject databases had superior coverage for archaeology (Tyler et al. , 2009).…”