eReviews: Jewish Studies Source from EBSCO Publishing
By Cheryl LaGuardiaFeb 1, 2011
Jewish Studies Source
EBSCO Publishing, ebscohost.com/academic/jewish-studies-source
CONTENT Jewish Studies Source (JSS) is a full-text database of more than 400 titles, including 123 journals and magazines, with 65 titles not available from other EBSCO databases. These additions include Aleph: Historical Studies in Science & Judaism, Ars Judaica, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, East European Jewish Affairs, Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Jewish Political Studies Review, Journal of Semitic Studies, Korot, Modern Judaism, and Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, as well as back files for significant titles. For examples, KASHRUS runs back to 1990, Contemporary Jewry to 1974, and the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science to 1946 (for the full list of titles, see the website above).
The collection also contains related articles from periodicals and newspapers as well as 1600-plus biographies of leading historical and contemporary Jews. Likewise, the whole Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA; see jta.org/about) database from 1922 to the present is available. Major subject areas addressed include Archaeology, Anthropology, Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, History, Languages, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Women’s Studies.
USABILITY As in other EBSCO databases, the interface here is the now-familiar EBSCO screen, with Basic, Advanced, and Visual searches available. I’m partial to Advanced Search, which offers multiple search boxes and Search Options (various Search Modes and Search Limits), so that’s what I’m using throughout this review. I’ve liked this interface ever since its debut, with one exception—the overprominence of the EBSCOhost brand next to the search box. I know I’m carping, but my researchers (like your researchers, I suspect) end up remembering the brand but not the database they searched. Me: “What have you searched?” Student: “Well, I searched EBSCO….” Harrumph. EBSCO clearly knows from good design, so how hard is it to increase the font size of the file’s name? Scholarship is based on the content, not the branding.
With the database itself, first I did some plain old searching: “Benjamin Netanyahu” pulled up 1,484 results. I limited those to “full-text” and got 1,471 results (not sure why, since this is supposed to be a full-text database), then limited that bunch to scholarly, peer-reviewed articles (these limits are very pleasantly easy to do) and got…ten results. Hmm. Seems kind of small. A scan of the results showed they came from sources like MERIA Journal, Israel Affairs, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, and Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture, so the content is solid but still sparse on the scholarly front. When I removed the limit to scholarly articles (back to the 1,471) with the dates from 2000 to 2010, I found mostly JTA news items concentrating on Netanyahu’s second stint as prime minister of Israel, not surprising given its recency (2009 to the present). When I went back in and searched his name for the period of his first prime ministry, I got 48 items coming from a mixture of news and scholarly sources. Makes perfect sense: it takes longer to get scholarly articles published.
My next search, for “Pentateuch,” limited to scholarly articles, returned five results. Out of curiosity, I ran the same search in a few other Jewish studies databases to which I have access. In the Index to Jewish Periodicals (IJP), I got 108 results for Pentateuch (28 of which were full text); in Old Testament Abstracts (OTA), I got 6650 results (1,044 full text); and in RAMBI: The Index of Articles on Jewish Studies, I got 1,089 results (163 full text). This makes a certain amount of sense owing to the search term and the subject nature of these indexes, although I’m not sure why there was such a discrepancy between the results in JSS and IJP. A search of all four databases for “sukkot” yielded these results: 51 in JSS (five full text), 304 in IJP (nine full text), 21 in OTA (of which one was full text), and 20 in RAMBI (three full text). The search for “six day war” located 1020 results in JSS (1,008 full text), 208 in IJP (46 full text), nine in OTA (zero full text), and 213 in RAMBI (65 full text). Likewise, “women soldiers” in JSS found 52 results (51 full text), seven in IJP (five full text), zero in OTA, and two in RAMBI (one full text).
Having access to the full text of so much within JSS is an obvious boon. Coverage of current events and contemporary issues in Jewish studies is very good here, and the back files of significant titles are useful. This file is certainly easier to search and work with results than RAMBI.
However, because EBSCO also publishes IJP, I’m wondering about the need for a new, separate file. According to its descriptions, “Index to Jewish Periodicals is the definitive index on Jewish history, activity and thought,” while “Jewish Studies Source offers a multidisciplinary view into the study of Jewish civilization from its historical origins to the present. Content within the collection is meant to cover all facets of Judaism and provide context by drawing across multiple areas of study.” They sound, look, feel, and search very similarly, although, as you can see from the search results, they do have varying content.
PRICING JSS costs anywhere from $2400 to $4800 per year for a single institution (ranges for consortia and online institutions may vary). Pricing is based on FTE, existing EBSCO contracts, consortial agreements, and buying groups. Pricing is discounted for customers with subscriptions to EBSCO’s Academic Search.
BOTTOM LINE For Jewish studies online completists, JSS is a must-have. For others, check out the title lists, compare content with more targeted subject indexes, and decide if perhaps you need to add this and drop IJP. My rating is a nine for the file as it stands. That would change to an 11-plus if JSS incorporated IJP’s content. For a free trial, go to ebscohost.com/academic/request-information/jewish-studies-source.
| Author Information |
| Cheryl LaGuardia is the Research Librarian for the Widener Library at Harvard University and author of Becoming a Library Teacher (Neal-Schuman, 2000). Readers and producers can contact her at claguard@fas.harvard.edu |
