The Education Index Retrospective is one of several “retrospective” products developed by the H.W. Wilson Company to serve as the electronic versions of longstanding and respected print indexes. The Education Retrospective covers the period 1929 to 1983, providing easy access to an important body of literature and a window to the past. Complementary products representing 1983 to current are also available from Wilson and at two different levels of content: Education Abstracts or Education Full Text.
The Wilson name is synonymous with extensive and precise indexing. According to a Wilson representative, indexers generally have Master's degrees in library science and either subject‐specific Master's degrees or significant subject expertise. Electronic content is updated four times per week. Major software enhancements are scheduled bi‐annually, January and July.
Not unexpectedly, the Education Retrospective provides comprehensive coverage of a wide variety of educational topics, from the broad areas of higher and vocational education to subject‐specific areas, such as mathematics and religious education. Unlike its closest US competitor (ERIC), the Education Retrospective focuses exclusively on journal literature. Nearly 600 English‐language periodicals are indexed.
Updated subject headings in the Wilson thesaurus facilitate searching via contemporary terminology. Original (“historical”) subject headings also appear in the records and when different from the current heading, provide a unique perspective on the historical characterization of issues and a reminder about the evolution of social conversation (e.g. “negroes” as the historical term for “blacks”). Hint from Wilson indexers: a subject heading containing the term “aspects” will often lead to articles presenting the pros and cons of a topic (e.g. abortion/religious aspects). The Thesaurus search option is visible from all WilsonWeb pages.
The WilsonWeb interface sports attractive hues, makes good use of white space for a crisp display, and is logically arranged. For institutions, with subscriptions to more than one WilsonWeb product, the database selection area appears prominently at the top. The Basic Search function displays the ubiquitous, uncomplicated Google‐like box and supports Boolean operators. Phrases can contain stop words without being rejected. Use quotation marks for exact phrase searching. As with most Advanced Search screens, multiple search boxes are available. Several of the drop‐down selection lists in Advanced Search contain fields that are irrelevant to users (will anyone really ever need to sort by a publication's Julian date?). Wilson acknowledges this and will be making changes (mid‐2006). The SmartSearch feature looks for your terms in key fields, including the “use‐for” field of the thesaurus (use‐for is not searched in the Keyword option). The relevance ranking rules for SmartSearch provided in the Help screens should instill confidence in the use of this as a default feature.
Limit functions are conveniently placed on the main Advanced Search page instead of buried beneath another click. Limiting by Physical Description is seldom seen in article databases, but is possible in Wilson products due to the depth of indexing. This limit allows users to narrow searches to documents containing illustrations, tables, maps, diagrams, and more. The Journal Directory feature is of particular note and needs more advertisement: titles link to all issues and one can search for keywords within a publication title.
Since the Education Retrospective is an index, the checkboxes for limiting to full text articles, PDF page images, peer‐reviewed journals, and searching within full text are greyed out…if you are using the Internet Explorer browser. This greying out was not at all obvious when using an out‐of‐the‐box version of the increasingly popular Mozilla Firefox browser. When attempting to limit to peer‐reviewed journals, at first I thought that there was something wrong with the JavaScript. Only after contacting Wilson did I learn that the Education Retrospective does not distinguish peer‐reviewed journals (the one negative aspect of this index which they will hopefully change). While this was an important piece of information, the whole exercise of trying to check disabled boxes was frustrating. If the checkboxes can be greyed out by product, they can just as easily be removed – which will eliminate browser specific testing and troubleshooting.
All too often, college students ignore print indexes to older literature because they are cumbersome to use and require a trip to the Library. Libraries can eliminate these as excuses and contribute to more effective research by subscribing to indexes such as the Education Index Retrospective. Wilson offers a variety of pricing options to cover both large and small budgets.
