Peer Review

Digital Commons Network: [Open Access] Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Dec 9, 2017 by Psychology

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

The Digital Commons Network: Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons contains and categorizes thousands of full-text, open access journal articles pertaining to Social and Behavioral Sciences. Within the psychology collection, there are currently over 39,000 articles.

The About link provides the following description: "The Digital Commons Network provides free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, this dynamic research tool includes peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work."

Type of Material:

Collection (Open Journal Articles)

Recommended Uses:

• The site is most appropriate as a resource for finding scholarly articles. It would be beneficial for homework, research and out-of-class activities. • The site would be particularly useful for course assignments requiring just a few articles, rather than a comprehensive literature review.

Technical Requirements:

It is possible to read Abstracts and some articles online; many articles are available for download via a PDF reader.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

• Users can quickly and easily access research articles in numerous areas of the social and behavioral sciences.

Target Student Population:

• This collection is appropriate for faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students. • All may access articles at no cost. • There are articles published in every area of psychology; the research represents undergraduate, graduate and faculty publications.

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

• Students will need a basic understanding of how to read a research article to benefit from the materials available via this site. • Not all of the materials have been peer reviewed, and students will need to learn and understand the difference among the types of work available.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:: • The collection is well-organized and easy to search. Users can search by keyword, institution, author, discipline, publication year, and publication type. There is a vast amount of information indexed through this site. (Most indexing is a result of connections with institutional libraries or databases). • The database includes materials from 1983 to present covering a range of areas within the Social and Behavioral sciences.
Concerns:: • The only real challenge lies with information literacy of the user. The site indexes everything from undergraduate student theses to peer-reviewed published articles. A novice user may struggle to differentiate the quality of the articles and research found in the collection. • Material available is from particular institutions and authors, but continues to grow. Those using the database may fail to understand they are only accessing a small portion of available research

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:: • This is a well-designed, organized collection of material. If a user requires additional research beyond what is available via library searches, this collection may expand the type of research that can be located. • Faculty and students can easily access materials for small projects or assignments.
Concerns:: • The challenge with rating this collection in terms of effectiveness as a teaching tool is that it is not really designed as a teaching tool; it is designed as a research dissemination tool. So, if a faculty member’s teaching objective involves research, information literacy or other topics in which finding research is essential, this could be valuable. But, more likely, this site is not going to be closely aligned to instructional activities. • The site includes access to newspapers, working papers, and dissertations, so students using the site still need to differentiate peer reviewed research articles from other online postings.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:: • The site incorporates a clear design with intuitive search options. As noted earlier, users can search by keyword, discipline, topic, author, institution, publication year, and publication type. There are a number of built in metrics to highlight usage rates and popular materials. • Because this is an open site, it is easy to obtain relevant research articles in an accessible format as most publications are .PDFs.
Concerns:: • Since this is a collection, there are thousands of links. While most links are active, there are occasional broken links (as a function of changes at the host institution site). • One can type in any terms, but the site does not limit the search by much. It is likely easier to open up the keywords and scroll through. At this time, there is a reasonable number to search – as the site grows, an advanced search function will likely be needed.

Other Issues and Comments:: This is an excellent research resource. It provides a number of options not typically indexed in library databases. The high usage rates and integration with institutional databases confirm that the information is very current. We will likely see this collection continue to grow as more scholars link to their work.
Creative Commons: