GSD provided more discreet writings by the authors and a wide variety of formats for writers’ works (books, articles, book reviews, and chapters), but that information was only discernable by viewing each record. The retrieval list for GSD was inconsistent, sometimes retrieving articles written by other authors about the target author. BSC has an excellent search interface, and the items retrieved were sorted into a variety of formats such as essays, journal, resource, newspapers, and other divisions. Individual works retrieved included national and international writings. PIO searches retrieved smaller sets because the database contains only journal articles, but the search interface is simple and allows separation of the content into articles and book reviews.
MLA Bibliography is an excellent resource covering thirty-eight of the forty individual writers in this survey. MLA has a simple search interface and a variety of options for retrieval of writings. After retrieving results, MLA provides options to refine the search into separate data sets such as peer reviewed, books, book chapters, dates, genre, and other options. The lack of coverage of Octavia Butler, one of the few black female writers of science fiction, and Pauli Murray, known for her legal and poetic legacies, is not explained.
Alexander Street Press’s Black Women Writers (BWW) focuses on voices of women from Africa and the African Diaspora, lacking coverage of African American women writers. BWW covered six of the writers in this survey: two SW (Angela Davis and Audre Lorde) and four pTW (Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Guy, and Margaret Walker Alexander). API and the API Archive (API/A) included writings by all of the SW writers but included only twelve of the twenty-five pTW writers. Communication Studies (CommSt) covered fourteen of the SW writers and nineteen of the pTW writers. Contemporary Women’s Issues covered the writings of sixteen of the forty women in this survey: eight of the SW and eight of the pTW. Using the author search options returned primarily book reviews.
Essay and General Literature Review (E&GLR), given its coverage that includes the humanities and social sciences, covered only twenty-eight of the forty writers, with a paltry number of citations for those covered. E&GLR covers subjects that range from economics, political science, and history to criticism of literary works, art history, drama, and film, areas in which most of the women in this survey have published writings. GenderWatch (GW) had an unimpressive return, covering only seventeen of the forty writers, ten SW and seven pTW. GW was hampered by its limited dates of coverage that will be further elaborated on in the discussion section of this article. Web of Science (WoS) covered thirty-seven of the writers, but is a difficult database to use because of the format of author citations. The search interface allows for last names and first-name initials only. Women and Social Movements (W&SM) covered only two of the writers as authors, but included all of the writers as subjects or discussion points in the new module in the database titled “The Second Wave and Beyond,” an online scholarly community. This feature offers an opportunity for those interested in the feminist movement to discuss and share research within the scholarly community, making W&SM an invaluable source for the study of this field.
Discussion
Searching for articles and books written by black feminist writers presented some challenges, but the overall coverage of the most commonly available of the research tools at most institutions offered a wealth of materials. Some databases are superior to others because of the simplified search interface, the scope of documents within the resource, and availability of a wide range of writings, but in other cases it was a matter of finding the right formula for retrieving items. The resources surveyed display a variety of strengths and weaknesses. These tools may offer access to articles available as abstracts, full text, or through interlibrary loan. This section of the article will include a discussion of each of the databases, offering some useful hints for the black feminist studies researchers interested in finding the most comprehensive materials in the field.
Table 5 lists the individual writers and the twelve databases surveyed, showing those databases where their writings are covered. The table includes the percentage of databases where each author’s works are located, the percentage of the forty writers covered for each database, and the average coverage for SW and pTW writers overall.
Alternative Press Index and Archive presented some serious problems and inconsistencies in searching. The scope and depth of searching was hindered by difficulties in searching for individual writers. When searching using a writer’s last and first name as search terms, results were found, but often indexing in this resource uses a last name and first initial. This presented serious problems for writers with common last names such as Davis, Cole, Parker, Scott, or Smith. Also, searching names as an author search sometimes retrieved articles about the authors’ books written by someone else. Despite these problems, searches retrieved articles and book reviews by each of the SW writers. Availability was confined to a brief citation listing and allowed no direct access to the articles, although a longer citation view includes format type. Discovering whether articles cited were peer reviewed was extremely difficult and required further research in many cases. Another flaw with API is that it required two separate searches, one for the Index and one for the Archive. It would be advantageous if those two databases were combined. A search to find articles for Nikki Giovanni using “Giovanni” only came up empty, but when using “Giovanni, Nikki,” articles were retrieved. “Davis, Angela” found nothing, but using “Davis, A” as a search string retrieved over sixty articles by or about her. API/A presented a similar problem when searching for writings by Trudier Harris, retrieving articles when a last name and the first initial were used. However, Harris is a common name; determining whether or not a work was written by her was not possible unless you knew the titles of her writings. There was a similar problem with Marshall, McKay, Shange, and others. In many instances it was impossible to determine if the cited author was the desired person or someone else with the same last name and first initial. In fact, there were writers with the same first and last names writing on similar topics, as in the case of Margaret Walker and Margaret Urban Walker, who both wrote on women’s issues. Sometimes Margaret Walker used her married name, Alexander, in her writings, but often she did not. Confusion between the two is inevitable.
Black Studies Center has an excellent search interface. Searches retrieved short citations, but only provided access to full-text articles listed in the Resource category. No access was available to those listed under Journals, which seems illogical and counterintuitive. BSC covers scholarly and popular black studies periodicals, but peer-reviewed articles were not identified. As a relatively new resource available since 2005, BSC continues to add to its various component modules. The scope of coverage makes this a great resource for researchers interested in black feminist writings. The one drawback to this resource is that the six black newspapers that are a part of the resource center must be purchased individually at a cost that is prohibitive for smaller library budgets.
Black Women Writers has a simple search interface and provides a useful division of a variety of formats for each author, such as newspaper, essay, media, and journal. Available since 2005, BWW is a relatively new resource, but it has a promising future as a useful resource for the study of black feminists’ writings.
Communication Studies has limitations for this study because its content dates from 1984 to the present. Many of the black feminist writers in this survey began their scholarly output much earlier than 1984, so this limited the scope of coverage for these women. Those articles retrieved included a citation and abstract for each entry, but despite its designation as a full-text resource, often the resources retrieved were not available as full text. The database provides a breakdown of the author’s writings into peer-reviewed journals, number of books, and catalogs published, but entries had to be checked to make sure the correct author is listed. Search terms should be specific to the author’s full name if possible. For instance, a search for “Davis, Angela” retrieved five published works, but one of the listings was for an Angela E. Davis, not Angela Y. Davis. Similarly, with a common name like Barbara Smith, an initial or knowledge of the person’s writings was necessary to find relevant material accurately. The interdisciplinary nature of many of the authors’ writings in this survey necessitated changing the subject area to include Art and Humanities or Social Sciences. An initial search for “Davis, Angela Y.” retrieved one item; searching under Arts and Humanities retrieved two articles; and searching under Social Sciences retrieved fifteen articles, eight of those being peer reviewed. A similar search for “Angelou, Maya” retrieved zero under the default and Social Sciences search, but five documents were retrieved under the Arts and Humanities search. Although the search strategy in CS can take time, the resources retrieved are useful to studying the writings of these individual black feminist writers.
Contemporary Women’s Issues is noteworthy for its multidisciplinary and international resources that include “grey literature.” The coverage of writings begins in 1992, excluding most of the writers in this survey with the exception of bibliographies and book reviews. Authors such as Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, and the late June Jordan, women with national and international reputations, continued to generate scholarly writings that were missing from this resource.
The search interface is difficult for the average searcher because the default search is full text, requiring use of the help screen to learn how to search. The help screen notes, “CWI’s search interface offers the ability to apply complex search logic to a query.”19 Even the most advanced researcher would have to continually review the help screen because the options are complex. The database provides four main options for searching for writings: by article author, book author, search title and enhanced title (ST&ET), and search full text and citation (SFT&C), along with options to restrict by subject, geographic region, article, and publication type. Of the four options for searching CWI, the SFT&C option retrieved the most coverage and includes works retrieved under the other searches. Despite these specific options, the searches returned very uneven coverage of the writers in this study. The retrieved results did include thorough information on the publication, including source, publisher, subject areas, record type, word count, publication and article type, country, and language. Tables 3 and 4 show that the coverage using the article author and book author options was mixed. Since this study is specifically about coverage of the writings of these individual authors, those were the only two options listed. Some examples of retrieved results for Maya Angelou using the article author option retrieved nothing; the book author option retrieved one book review of Angelou’s writings; searching by both the ST&ET and the SFT&C options retrieved an interview transcript with Angelou. Using these same criteria for searching for works with Toni Cade Bambara, using only her last name, retrieved nothing under article author; a book review of her work was retrieved in the book author search; but the SFT&C option retrieved fifty-five results of which thirty-eight referenced her writings. CWI offers Boolean searching. For example, using the search options for Gwendolyn Brooks retrieved nothing, but using the Boolean option, “Brooks AND Gwendolyn” retrieved thirty-four titles with twenty-three of those related to the poet Gwendolyn Brooks.