SIRS Researcher is a general periodical reference with thousands of full‐text articles and graphics exploring social, scientific, historic, economic, political, and global issues with articles dating back to 1989. The product indexes more than 1500 publications which seem more suitable to junior high, high school, and community college students.
The program runs in DOS (a Macintosh version is also available and a Windows version is in development) and installs from a floppy disk. SIRS Researcher requires a minimum of 512 KB of conventional memory (540 KB recommended). Since Windows 95 configures all available memory for its own use, it may leave insufficient resources for applications and increase the likelihood of encountering “unrecoverable error 5302: conventional memory exhausted” messages.
The SIRS Researcher main menu offers three databases: Full‐text articles, Newsline, and Directory of Publications. Full‐text articles lets you search by subject headings or keyword or browse topics (listed by SIRS volume and year). Selecting a subject headings search retrieves an alphabetical list of subjects. You can scroll the list or type a word to go to the appropriate point in the list.
Retrieving an article will display the full text of the article preceded by the source and date. The total number of lines in the article appear in the upper right corner; and each line is numbered along the left margin for easy reference, including blank ones. When you decide to print or download the text, you can select up to five segments by designating beginning and ending lines. Otherwise, the program defaults to printing the entire article. You can also choose whether or not to include the line numbers.
If an article contains a chart, graph, map, or photograph, a graphic icon will appear aside the title. Pressing a function key will display the image.
Keyword Search permits searching for up to three words in the text, combined with the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT. The search engine operates on the first term before letting you select a Boolean operator and a second term. If you only want one term, you can press the Enter key through all the steps to complete the search or press the Page Down key to execute the search immediately. To truncate single key words, type the root of the word followed by an asterisk. This displays a list from which to choose the desired word. You cannot search for phrases here. If you want to search for “death and dying,” you must put each term on separate lines in the DOS version. Keying them as a phrase will produce no results. However, the Macintosh, Windows, and Web versions allow multiple word searching.
The F7 key toggles between basic and enhanced options. The latter offers the ability to key terms in the title, author, or subject headings fields. When you retrieve an article, the cursor goes directly to the first occurrence of a search term, highlighted in blue.
Topic browse lets you view the list of topics covered in the database: aging, AIDS, alcohol, applied science, atmosphere, communication, consumerism, corrections, crime, death and dying, defense, drugs, earth science, economics, energy, ethics, ethnic groups, family, food, government, habitat, health, history, human rights, life science, medical science, mental health, money, physical science, pollution, population, privacy, religion, school, sexuality, sports, technology, third world, transportation, women, work, world affairs, and youth. You cannot search for all articles on a given subject in this mode; you must also choose a year of publication. Results display in reverse chronological order.
Topic browse offers a good way to broaden a search or to explore contemporary issues by year of publication. Selecting to view the bibliographic source (F5) of an article displays the title, author, source, publication date, page numbers in the original print publication, and the location in the corresponding print volume in the SIRS series.
The Newsline database provides brief descriptions of major news events, beginning with January 1, 1995. You can search this database by subject heading, much as in the subject search for full‐text articles or you can browse the items by date, arranged in inverse chronological order. You can also search by month and date (e.g. 0396). Even though this option only provides news capsules, a function key (F3) links to articles in the full‐text database that cover the topic. This is a great way to retrieve articles by date.
The Directory of Publications database provides background information on more than 1500 magazines, newspapers, and journals. It is provided as a resource database; and there is no correlation between it and the source list of publications in the full‐text database. It includes a brief description of the editorial content plus editorial and subscription addresses, phone and fax numbers, and some e‐mail addresses. You can search for publications either by title or by category.
In addition to the User’s Manual, the F1 key provides online instruction on the program’s features and formulating a search. The final chapter in this online help provides suggestions on How to Cite Sources from SIRS Researcher. It adapts the text of the major style manuals, Turabian, MLA (Modern Language Association), and APA (American Psychological Association), to provide guidelines for citing the online sources. This is a very useful feature, as creating bibliographies and citing sources for standardized printed works is difficult enough for high school students. However, buried at the end of the online help, this feature is not likely to get noticed as much as it should. The web version of SIRS Researcher makes the citation information more visible by placing the option on the main screen. The CD version should also draw greater attention to it by placing it as an option on the menu.
SIRS Researcher is a good tool for junior high, high school, and community college students, especially because, when they locate articles, they get the full text without having to track it down. Students will not feel overwhelmed by the results as they might with other periodical databases. Teachers and librarians will want to review the source list and the selection criteria to determine how to approach the databases critically and to instruct students in their use.
Magazine and newspaper coverage is selective. Also, the most recent articles tend to be dated at least three months prior to the release date of the CD‐ROM, most likely due to embargoes and license restrictions. The editors try to cover issues and events of both national and global significance and try to include a diversity of viewpoints on controversial issues. While the database does not propose to support cutting edge research, it is clearly not usable for very recent events, such as analyzing the 1996 elections within a couple of months of the elections. SIRS Researcher is a good source to research popular topics for research papers and to get a balance of viewpoints. Subscribers will appreciate the fact that the price includes a license to network the product within a single site. Recommended for junior high, high school, and community college libraries.
