Searching for works by Patricia Hill Collins retrieved four articles, all written by her, and all were peer-reviewed, although the database doesn’t note this distinction; searching book author retrieved six titles, but all were reviews of Collins’ works; the SFT&C option retrieved sixty-six results of writings by or about Collins, including those found in the article and book author search options. Searching for works by Barbara Smith proved even more challenging because of the commonness of her name. Knowledge of the preponderance of her writings on gay issues and on black women writers was essential in finding her works. Of the ten items retrieved under the book author search, seven were references to Smith’s works; SFT&C retrieved twenty-six works, but discerning which were Smith’s works required viewing each of the retrieved sources and reading through each article. The author Barbara Ellen Smith also writes on feminist topics and her writings were retrieved under Smith’s name, and often the indexer did not include her middle name or initial.
Despite the search problems and uneven coverage of the individual black feminist writers in this survey, CWI is an importance resource because there was material on each of the individual writers, albeit from the perspective of other writers reviewing or citing their works. The inclusion of the writings of SW and pTW black feminists in this resource demonstrates the global importance of their works; they are being cited in the works of international scholars, included in major women’s studies journals, and are consistently listed in bibliographies on feminist scholarship.
Essay and General Literature Review has a limited scope of coverage because its focus is only on books and anthologies. Online indexing began in 1985, thus eliminating many of the writings of both the SW and pTW writers. The retrospective of this database has just become available, so it was outside the scope of this project. The database presented some serious problems when searching using full names of the writers because the retrieved results listed only a last name and a first initial. This required reviewing all results for relevance to the individual author. For some writers, such as Michele Wallace and Barbara Smith, this database listed each of the chapters in their books as individual essays, including those books where they are the single author, thus skewing the search results.
Gender Studies Database provides a very simple search interface readily accessible on the home page. Search results are listed as short citations with links to the full records if available; often there are only citations with subject terms. Scope and indexing coverage includes every possible format. Some book records retrieved provide a table of contents. The tables only show the total citations for each author because of the peculiarities of the search mechanism. The results of an author search are a combination of works written by the author and reviews of the targeted authors’ publications by other writers. This database, similar to several others, gives a total number for all of the writings, but doesn’t distinguish between books, articles, or reviews. For example, a search for “Angelou, Maya” retrieved forty-four citations, but only thirty-five were actually written by her. The forty-four citations included multiple essays from the same book, some by the author but often written by another author, and the target author was listed along with the other writer of the essay, again, skewing the totals. It would take much more time to distinguish between those items that were books, peer-reviewed and not peer-reviewed articles, especially if the search retrieved a large number of citations. In the case of bell hooks, the search retrieved 165 citations: 142 showed her as the author and twenty-three were reviews of her works. Barbara Smith posed additional problems because of the commonness of her name, although other Barbara Smiths do appear to use their middle initials. The initial search for her works retrieved 213 citations, but close examination of the list to remove false drops narrowed the citations to 165, because many of these were duplicates or books with each chapter listed as a separate citation. Although problems were encountered in searching, the results are impressive and cover virtually everything published by the writers.
GenderWatch is a full-text database that covers subjects related to how gender affects society and dates back to the 1970s. The database contains scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, nongovernmental organizations, and government and special reports. The search interface is not on the home page, so it would be wise to look at the Search Tips before entering the search site. After entering the site, the basic search interface, similar to PIO and MLA, date range, and limits can be set for scholarly peer-reviewed journals or biographical information. For an author-specific search, the advanced search tab must be used. Results retrieved include links to the abstract and full-text articles, but very few books are retrieved. Scholarly journals, magazines, or other source material are included in the retrieved set. Another feature of this resource is an alert service that can be set up to inform the researcher when new material on a particular author is added.
For consistency of results throughout this survey, only the author-related search option was recorded to evaluate the coverage of the individual writers. Additional search options retrieved a wealth of articles about or which referenced the individual writers; this was beyond the scope of this article. The results of author searching were very disappointing considering the subject coverage scope of GW. It appears to cover the 1990s and the 2000s very well, but the 1970s to 1980s are lacking in important content, especially for many of the SW writers in this survey. Although the database states that it is a full-text resource, there were a number of searches that only retrieved an abstract.
MLA Bibliography has a comprehensive scope of coverage; the database indexes books, journals, dissertations, book articles, and websites. MLA provided the most sophisticated search interface. Either before or after an author name search, the results can be narrowed to peer-reviewed articles, language desired, genre, period, and other publication types such as book chapters, forewords, or electronic. Depending on the name searched, adding a middle initial may help focus a search or make it overly restricted. For example, searching for “Davis, Angela” retrieved nine items, six articles by the targeted author, three by other authors with the same last name but different middle initials, but searching “Davis, Angela Y.” retrieved five items. The wisest choice is to do both searches, or at least to experiment with middle initials to see what results are found. Searches can be categorized by format, identifying items as book, journal article, or book article.
Periodicals Index Online only indexes journal articles. It has an easy search interface on its home page. The scope of coverage is comprehensive, including national and international journal articles. The search results include peer-reviewed articles and book reviews. The ability to filter the results retrieved by journal titles, languages, dates, or subjects helps to narrow the results to the correct author. For example, searching for “Christian, Barbara” retrieved thirty-one articles, but not all were her articles. The option of filtering the searches by language first narrowed the listing to twenty-six in English, then filtering by subject and in some cases by journal helped to narrow the listing even more. Limiting by language, however, will lose articles translated into foreign languages, as was the case with one of Christian’s articles that had been republished in Italian. Filters are good if the diverse areas of a particular author’s research and writings are known. There are also some further issues on using the middle initial of authors. The search for “Davis, Angela Y.” retrieved ten items, but the search for “Davis, Angela” retrieved twenty-nine titles, twenty-three of which were the Davis in the study. The search would have missed thirteen additional titles had only the middle initial been used. On the other hand, a search for “Guy-Sheftall, Beverly” retrieved eight citations, and conversely, searching “Sheftall, Beverly” retrieved the same eight citations.
In Web of Science (WoS), the retrieval of content is determined by the researcher bridging the steep learning curve for this resource. WoS has its genesis mapping citations to scientific papers, and that model is not suited to discovering humanities or social sciences articles. Using the Author Find tool in WoS is helpful, but the major drawback is that the search engine only allows searching by the author’s last name and first and middle initial. The database provides a number of options for pinpointing writers. Options are available to limit by discipline and by university affiliation, but if the writer is not affiliated with a university, as in the case of Audre Lorde or Octavia Butler, then results must be viewed individually. If the journals are known, it is possible to limit by source, type, or publication year, but these are all imprecise. The Preferred Name format works well in searching for authors with names that are not common, such as Sonia Sanchez or Ntozake Shange, but for names such as Barbara Smith or Pat Parker, it presents serious searching problems. Both women have written extensively, so searching involves reviewing each citation for relevancy. A new feature called the Distinct Author is a discovery tool showing sets of papers possibly written by the same person. Citation data is analyzed to create these sets. This feature is best used as a tool to focus a search rather than as a definitive list of a specific author’s works.
Women and Social Movements is a series of document projects that include primary and secondary writings within each project and is published as an online journal. This Alexander Street Press resource continues to evolve from day to day, so what is seen on the home page may not be there in the future, a fact to keep in mind when using this resource. The writings include primary and secondary source materials such as photographs, poetry, court documents, newspaper articles, broadsides, and letters documenting women and social movements in the United States from 1600 to 2000. A search of writers in this study retrieved primary source documents on only Maya Angelou and the attorney Pauli Murray. Of particular interest to researchers of black feminist writers is the module included under Women’s Commissions on the WSM homepage called “Second Wave” and Beyond, a free online scholarly community of feminist thinkers that will facilitate a supportive framework for online publishing and discussion of feminist activism and theories. The website provides a history of feminist activism since the 1960s and links to oral histories, discussions, reviews, images, teaching, and research resources. Discussions with the group of scholars may be useful for further developing ideas for research and scholarship.