A new firearms research database launched by the Harvard School of Public Health makes scholarly articles more accessible to reporters, law enforcement, public health officials, policymakers, and the general public. The Firearms Research Digest provides summaries [this is not a full text database*] of articles gathered from social science, criminology, medical and public health journals and is written in clear, accessible language for use by those outside academia.
* Complete bibliographic info is provided to make accessing the complete article (if needed) simple using one of many methods.
The website currently covers six years of research published between 2003 and 2008. The digest will be expanded over time to include articles from 1988 to the present.
“Despite the increased ease of accessing articles through search engines like Google Scholar or PubMed, the sheer volume of returned information in technical jargon can be daunting,” said David Hemenway, professor of health policy and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Youth Violence Prevention Center at HSPH. “The principal objective of this digest is to present research findings in clear, lay language so anyone can readily understand the study results.”
The database interface on the home page is searchable by keywords, title, topic, and author.
You can do much the same with the advanced interface (including the selection from a list of topics) and another list of publication names.
A results page includes the number of hits in each search category and related topics with the number of entries that specific topic has in the database.
Finally, an actual result has most of its metadata hyperlinked. For example, all authors names, topics, publications, etc.
The Firearms Research Digest will be a useful resource for many people (reporters, educators, students, etc.) since the database is easy to use the digests are written without using any technical jargon. The database does need documentation/explanation to explain how the database works, especially topics vs. keywords, why one interface over another, and what the numbers mean next to each search category on a results page. At the present time there is either no "help" content or we missed it (which is quite possible).
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