Reference Reviews
Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
May 2007
Title: ACM Digital Library
Publisher: ACM
URL: http://www.acm.org
Cost: partially open access
Tested: continuously
The Context
There are not many options for open access indexing/abstracting databases about computer science and technology. Records related to the topic are scattered among many databases even in the subscription-based arena, and are especially dispersed in the open access domain, where several dozens of publishers offer bibliographic records and abstracts about papers in their own journals and other serials publications. Of course, there are many open access records and even full-text papers about computer science-related articles and conference papers also in the entirely open access databases such as PubMed Central, EconPapers, arXiv, etc.
The Content
The ACM Digital Library is part of the ACM Portal, which also includes the open access indexing/abstracting database of Guide to Computing Literature. Together, these two collection represent the largest, partially open access indexing/abstracting records about dedicated to computer science and technology.
It is especially remarkable that most of its journals, magazines, ACM Transactions series and ACM Proceedings are available from volume 1 issue 1 to the most current issue (or last issue in case the periodical ceased publication earlier). Somewhat lesser proportion of the dozens of ACM Special Interest Groups (SIGs) Newsletters is available digitally. It is even more important that ACM charges only $10 for non-members per papers (irrespective of their length). Members of ACM without subscription to the ACM Digital Library can have the papers for $5, and students are charged $3. These days the typical cost of full text papers at publishers' sites is $30-35, and even more expensive through the British Library Lending Division, and other document delivery services which charge you $12-$15 for shipping and handling, a tad steep price for locating a known item and attaching the document to an e-mail for instant delivery which often has extra fees.
Several of the ACM journals and ACM Transactions are top ranked year after year among the journals in the various topical categories, such as Information Systems, Computer Hardware & Architecture, and Software Engineering in the Journal Citation Reports of Thomson ISI. The ranking details are here, and they may change for the better as the new edition of JCR is to be published in a few weeks.
There are almost 202,000 items in the ACM Digital Library alone. Most of them are from ACM's own publications, with a small percentage of joint publications with other publishers.
The other important component of the ACM Portal is the Guide to Computing Literature which covers the publications of the ACM, and several thousand other journals. The total number of records now exceeds one million, far above the 750,000 indicated by the Frequently Asked Questions. The non-ACM publications include academic and professional journals and conference proceedings, such as Information Processing and Management, Information Services & Use, and Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Software and Applications.
The content of the open access records is similar to the ones you would find in many other publishers' digital collections, consisting of a bibliographic citation and often an abstract. It is the set of open access extras that makes ACM stand out.
ACM has a sophisticated and almost constantly updated classification system and terms are assigned from it not only for the papers from ACM publications, but also for the ones from other publications. The section about collaborative colleagues list the names of those researchers with whom the author of the current paper has published papers. This is particularly important for authors who often publish with co-authors.
There is an optional section in many records called peer-to-peer listing papers which were read by at least 500 readers of the retrieved primary paper.
The most valuable extra feature is the list of cited references extracted from the articles, with appropriate details. It would be better if the URLs in the citations were made clickable, as the blue links would stand out from the lists. The list of cited references in the ACM Digital Library subset illustrates how this looks.
The list of citing references is just a sample as in most other publishers' collections - but a big difference is that they are not limited to the stable of publications of the publisher, in this case to ACM. It is another question that these links to the citing references are available only for subscribers, even the bibliographic citations and abstracts.
The Software
The software offers the usual options of exact phrase searching, mandatory term searching, field-specific searching and the like – but most of the features are available only for subscribers as the advanced search template requires a paid user-id and password (not the free or limited alternative). This is quite unusual, although the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) and the Elsevier ScienceDirect sites have similar limitations. It alleviates the problem somewhat, that the ACM Digital Library is also accessible through the advanced template of the IEEE Computer Society Web site.
I also would like to see more export options beyond the BibTex, ACM Ref and EndNote format. In particular I would like the very popular CSV and RefWorks formats. In addition, it would facilitate the selection of the most promising items if the entries from the result list could be marked – as is typical in most digital collections.
In spite of some of the unusual software limitations, this is an excellent resource for researchers, practitioners and computer science students – even if their library does not have a subscription to the full repository of the ACM Digital Library. Chances are good that some of the digital repositories would offer the full-text version of many of the articles identified through the open access segment of the ACM Digital Library (and the companion Guide to Computing Literature).
— Péter Jacsó