STATSnetBASE is an online collection of statistical books published by CRC and a companion database to the same publisher’s MATHnet BASE, also reviewed in this issue of Reference Reviews (RR2003/399). As of the time of review, there are 38 titles online in STATSnetBASE, with four to five books being added every month. The ultimate number of titles to be offered by STATSnetBASE has not been decided. New titles are added as they become available in print. The online version of each book has the same content as the most recent print version, but the copyright date may be different in the online format. Sample titles included are Clinical Trials in Oncology (2nd ed., print publication July 2002); Bayes and Empirical Bayes Methods for Data Analysis (2nd ed., June 2000); Analysis of Messy Data, Volume III: Analysis of Covariance (August 2001); and the CRC Standard Probability and Statistics Tables and Formulae (December 1999). This latter volume is a classic statistics book that many students and faculty will refer to for course work and research needs.
Books may be browsed individually or through 12 categories, among which are: statistics for computing; business and finance; engineering and physical sciences; medicine and health sciences; and psychology, social science, and law. Adobe Acrobat is required to view the text of the books. The search engine lets users choose between simple and advanced search screens. STATSnetBASE supports Boolean and natural language search requests. Under the advanced screen, users may select to search across all the books in the collection or limit their search to selected titles. Natural language, phonic and stemming strategies can be selected and be used simultaneously. The number of results can be limited, and the maximum number of results is 500. In a natural language search, STATSnetBASE automatically weights terms based on an analysis of their distribution in the resulting documents. Users can provide specific term weights in a natural language search.
The search results are displayed in table format, and the books with the highest number of hits appear first. Each entry lists the book title, the number of times the search term appears, the chapter and the document size. The actual files, in PDF format, load quickly. The documents are readable at 190 per cent magnification. The help file, located on the advanced search screen, presents some search tips, and technical assistance (phone numbers, an e‐mail address and help files) is available from the home page. These files address configuration issues with Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers in viewing PDF files. The price for the database is reasonable, and the publisher will honour the price for the first renewal. The format offered by STATSnetBASE is easy to use and highly readable.
