EMERALD (The Electronic Management Research Library) is a CD‐ROM database of 87 management journals published by MCB University Press with articles from 1994 to the present provided in full text and articles from 1989‐1993 in abstracts and keywords only. It covers about 3000 journal issues in all. Included with the CD‐ROM updates are subscriptions to the £18000 worth of hard copy journals included on the CD‐ROM. You need not purchase the full service, however, since that can be a bit pricey. In subscribing to the EMERALD database you can choose to subscribe to only one of the journals in the collection or as many as you wish. The price, of course, varies with the number of journals chosen. A query to technical support about networking indicated that the database was networkable and that there was no subscription price differential for this.
Articles are classified by the database publisher as being case studies, literature reviews, surveys, purely theoretical, theoretical with worked examples, theoretical with applications in practice, comparative/evaluative, or technical. Articles are also graded for quality using one to three stars with the highest rating going to those articles that make very clear specific implications for further research, that make very clear specific implications for practitioners, that pay close attention to accessibility for the non‐specialist reader, or that are highly original in approach and/or concept. Searching is enhanced by the use of the thesaurus which links commonly used synonyms so that when the searcher types in a term that occurs in the thesaurus, all synonymous terms are automatically included in the search. In addition to being searchable, the database can also be browsed by journal title or author. Journal titles are grouped into subject areas including marketing, human resources, quality, information management, library and information services, training and education, property, general management, and operations, production and economics. Browsing can be done by author, journal title, article title, keyword, publication year, journal type, article type or quality indicator.
Setting up EMERALD was a painless procedure with the exception of the requirement that a code from the publisher is needed to unlock the database for use. After the setup is partially completed, the CD‐ROM presents the user with a lengthy code that must be relayed to the publisher by fax or email. A reply code is returned by fax or email and once this is entered into the proper dialog box, the setup is completed and the database can be searched. All or part of the database can be unlocked depending on how much you choose to purchase.
The first disc of the set contains the search software and the full text articles in ASCII format. The formatting for the display is beautifully done with a narrow frame to the left of the screen with hypertext connections to each section of the article, i.e., title, keywords, references, and any headings that occur in the article. The articles themselves are also connected using hypertext so that clicking on a reference citation in the article itself takes you to that citation in the bibliography, clicking on a reference to a table displays the table, and so forth. The second disc of the database contains the same articles as on the first disc but in Adobe Acrobat format so that they appear just as they did in the original journal but without the hypertext links available on the first disc.
Minimum system requirements are a 386 or 486 PC using Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 with 4 MB RAM and 20MB free disk space, though 8 MB RAM are recommended.
Using the browse feature on journal titles reveals that some issues of journals are excluded and some articles are excluded from the database even though their issues are included in the database. There is no indication in the documentation as to whether this will be remedied in future releases or if some articles and issues are permanently excluded from the database.
Searching can be done from the simplified basic search screen or from the advanced search screen that contains nearly every imaginable option for searching arranged in a simple and easily understood format. Choose the keywords and what to search: the full text of the database or only portions of it (titles, authors, etc.). Join the key words with “and,” “or,” or “not” or search by proximity with the key words in the same document, same paragraph, or choose a particular number of words separating them. Choose to search the words as an exact phrase and use the thesaurus to select which synonyms to search. Finally, you can choose to search only a particular type of article, as noted above, such as case studies, literature reviews, etc.
On my wish list for this product would be a way to mark a number of journal articles and send them to be printed or downloaded all at once. The current software only allows you to print or download a single article or portion of an article at a time. This can be somewhat time‐consuming if you have several articles to print and your printer is slow.
Overall, this is a beautifully done database with superb full text searching features. The search software and the documentation are both easy to understand and very user‐friendly. This is the finest full text journal database on CD‐ROM that I have examined. It manages the difficulty of finding one’s place in long ASCII text documents with the contents frame so you never feel lost in a long article. It also manages the problem of ASCII text vs. page image by including both. Imaged information is usually more difficult to read on the computer screen than ASCII text so I usually prefer to read articles in text; but sometimes there is no substitute for seeing the journal page as it was originally produced.
