If you are a Google user then you'll enjoy the simple interface of Social Sciences in Forestry. Users can search by author, title or keyword. Searching for publications but not sure where to start? The small list of 41 subject headings is easy to peruse. Additionally, links to three other online resources are provided for those interested in finding publications related to many of the subject headings. The journals indexed list (with hundreds of titles) will also serve as an aid to users who know the name of a journal but not the author or year.
While the scope indicates that it runs from 1985 to the present, the scroll down menu suggests that it starts indexing citations at 1982. Doing a simple keyword search using the word “tree” yielded 29 items published in 1982 after I limited it by year. There is an option to e‐mail the results, but after two and a half minutes of loading I was sent to the infamous “the page cannot be displayed” page. After realizing that I did nOt mark any records, I tried the search again and this time marked all 29 records. After minutes of watching the blue bar at the bottom of my computer screen creep along, I was suddenly sent back to the “page cannot be displayed” page again. Sensing that 29 might have been too much for the system to take, I replicated my search strategy and instead marked only five records. Same disappointment.
Attempts to save the results to a disk yielded the same poor results and will certainly disappoint those doing research away from their home computer or those unable to print their selected records. After the above incidents, I was not sure about what my outcome might be with printing selected records but found that it proved to be successful. As an aside, through trial and error I learned that it is necessary to mark your record and click on the Limit to Marked Records button. Otherwise, you will print pages of all the records from your search. Mission accomplished. On the help page, unlike other databases, the user can find direct contact information to the editor.
Two editors, two indexers and one technical support person from the University of Minnesota helped make this resource available to users. Philip Herold is the current editor and has a dual role in that he is also an indexer. He is the subject specialist for forestry and tourism at the University of Minnesota. Despite some of the quirky nuances, this free database is recommended as a good starting point for those interested in forestry research.
