Database bibliographical

A database bibliographical is a Database which contains Bibliographic records. This definition applies to any category of bibliographical objects: books, collections, reviews, articles of reviews etc.

Bibliographical characteristics of a database

Structure of the data

The term bases of data used here must be included/understood with precaution. Indeed, they are rather a collection data or bibliographic records. This apparently simple structure can hide factors of complexity.

The structure of the recordings can be relatively elementary (simple collection of fields), more complex with formats MARC (or in conformity with the standard ISO 2709), and maintaining of an unspecified structure with XML.

Compared to the relational Databases, a factor of complexity comes from impossibility of solidifying the size of the data. Practically all the fields are variable length with factors of repetition being able to become very important. For example, a name of author makes on average less than 10 characters, but one finds authors of more than 100 characters. A scientific article has on average 2 or 3 authors but one to find articles of physics with 500 authors.

Indexing and reference frames

Many bibliographical databases contain information describing the contents using a list of terms of Indexation or key words. These key words often belong to terminological reference frames whose nature is variable: simple list of controlled words, plan of classification, thesaurus or ontology.

In addition to the indexing, many data can refer to specialized reference frames, such as for example, the titles of periodical or the affiliations.

Finally certain bases also codify the references of the bibliography of the treated articles (example Science Quotation Index). the bibliographical base becomes its own reference frame then.

Set of themes and cover

The bibliographical bases are also defined according to the selected sets of themes. It can influence the structure of the base considerably (for example, in life sciences codings of genes).

A base is also not defined its cover, or more precisely the way in which the base is made up. In many cases (Medline, Pascal) the cover is defined by a whole of reviews which are systematically stripped.

Examples

Chemical Abstracts - scientific Articles in chemistry - American Origin, Chemical Abstracts Service (CASE)
Francis - scientific Articles in social sciences - French Origin (CNRS, INIST) - French summaries - bilingual indexing (French, English).
Google Scholar - Origin company Google, the United States.
Medline - Life science and medicine - origin American administration (National Library off Madecine)
Pascal - Technical Science and Medicine - French Origin (CNRS, INIST) - bilingual indexing (French, English).
WorldCat - catalogs collective (monographs and periodicals) - Origin OCLC (the United States) - sometimes quoted like greatest world bibliographical base

See too

Database chemical

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