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).
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
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