Emerald Intelligence and Fulltext CD‐ROM is a database of 86 business and management journals published by MCB University Press. These journals cover the broad areas of: marketing; human resources; general management; information management; library information services; training and education; operations and production management; property; and quality management. The CD provides the full text of all articles published during 1994 and 1995, together with abstracts of all articles from 1989. Articles for which there is only an abstract can be supplied in full from the Emerald document management centre. Up to 500 articles in any one year will be supplied at no further cost.
The CD runs under Windows 3.1 or higher and requires a minimum of 4MB free disk space for installation of the software. It is very easy to install. You do, however, need to call the helpdesk as the CD is security “locked”. You can therefore be given access to all journals or just selected titles. Emerald comes as a two‐CD package. You only need the second CD if you wish to see the image of articles exactly as they appeared in the journals as they are stored on this CD in Page Image format. The disc can be freely networked and printing and saving to disc is a relatively easy matter. The documentation supplied with the review disc states that the CD will be updated four times per annum. One is, however, left wondering at what point the 1996 journals will begin to appear! In addition, the CD is supported by a monthly electronic journal accessed via the Internet. It is interesting that MCB have chosen the CD route for electronic dissemination of their journals, when many other publishers are opting for Web services.
The search software has been designed to allow three main types of access: browsing through the database; searching using the various defined indexes by author, article type, keyword, year of publication, journal title, or quality indicator; or searching the complete text of the CD‐ROM. Every article in the database has been given an article type classification. Articles can be wholly theoretical; theoretical with a worked example; theoretical with application in practice; a literature review; a survey; a case study; comparative or evaluative; or technical. In addition, four key research categories have been used as quality indicators. These are: implications drawn for further research; implications drawn for practitioners; general readability and accessibility to the non‐specialist; and originality of argument or concept. Each article is then “graded” with one to three “stars” on each of these categories. It is interesting that, in a database of approximately 15,000 articles, only 25 articles have been given three stars for originality, while 274 get three stars for research implications. Given the current importance of research ratings in higher education one would have expected to find more. However this is perhaps more an indication of the practicability of the content of MCB journal titles.
The trends towards full text electronic storage of journal articles is very welcome in that it enables users to access more fully the information contained within each article ‐ something not otherwise possible unless you were to read every article! Hence any information service with this Emerald CD can better exploit the contents of the 86 journals. However, one of the drawbacks of computer technology is that it is also easier to spot errors and inconsistencies. My biggest problem with this product was discovering that several articles appear ‐ word for word ‐ in more than one journal, for example:
David Kaye, “Sources of information, formal and informal”, appears in Library Management, Vol.16 No. 5, 1995 and Management Decision, Vol. 33 No. 5, 1995.
Tony Oulton, “Management research for information”, appears in Management Decision, Vol. 33 No. 5, 1995 and Library Management, Vol. 16 No. 5, 1995.
N. Menon, “Functionally dependent stress among managers: a new perspective”, appears in Employee Counselling Today, Vol. 6 No. 4, 1994 and Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 9 No. 3, 1994.
S.H. Appelbaum, “Mentoring revisited: an organizational behaviour construct”, appears in International Journal of Career Management, Vol. 6 No. 3, 1994 and Journal of Management Development, Vol. 13 No. 4, 1994.
These are just a few which leapt out of the database ‐ but perhaps there are others!
Whether libraries purchase this product will depend on how relevant the journal titles are to their collections ‐ and ultimately on their budgets!
