Authority

• Does the publisher, sponsoring agency, vendor or producer have a good business reputation and is considered reliable?
• Is the authority of the product clearly stated in the user documentation?
• What is the authority of the indexers?

Audience

• Who is the primary audience for the product? (Undergraduates, Graduate Students, Faculty, Adults, Children, Layperson)

Scope

Time Coverage

• What is the time period covered in this resource?
• How many years of data are in the database?

Geographical Coverage

• Is it international in scope?
• Does it just cover the United States?
• Are there any additional geographic restrictions?

Currency

• How current is the information in this resource?
• What is the lag time between when a periodical is published as opposed to when it appears in the index?

Update

• How frequently is it updated? (daily, weekly, monthly quarterly?)

Language

• Are there multiple languages represented in the publications in the resource?
• If multiple languages publications are present, are citations and abstracts available in English?

Publications

• What types of materials are covered? journal articles? books, documents, pamphlets? conference proceedings?
• How many publications are covered?

Record Format

• Are abstracts available for all records?
• Are abstracts available for selected records?
• What percentage of the database has abstracts?
• Are articles available in full text?
• What percentage of the titles are available in full text?
• If journals are not indexed cover to cover, are exclusions documented?
• Are images (including photographs, graphs and illustrations) available in all articles?
• What percentage of the resource's titles include full image?
• If images are not all available online, are they available to be faxed?

Relation to Similar Works

• How does it compare with similar works on the same topic?
• Is it similar in scope to other works in your collection?
• Is there significant content overlap between this electronic resource and other currently locally available electronic resources?
• What makes this work unique or distinguishes it from other sources?

Product Comparisons

• If the product is available from multiple vendors, how does one version differ from the others?
• What are the differences in searching interfaces?
• What are the differences in display options?
• What are the differences in and output options?

Availability

• Is the resource available on the web?
• Is the resource available to mount locally?
• Does it require maintenance or serial updating?

Accuracy

• How reliable is the information presented?
• How dirty is the database in terms of the presence of misspelled words?
• What is the error rate?
• Is the indexing quality accurate?
• Are the bibliographic citations accurate?
• What quality control procedures does the producer use?

General Indexing Features

• What are the basic components of the record?
• What fields of the record are searchable?
• Can the full text be searched? Is it optional?
• Can indexing be controlled locally?

Author Indexing

• Are all authors associated with an indexed item included?
• Are author names spelled in the index as they are in the work?
• Are authors listed only by the initials of the author and not the full name as it appears on the publication?

Subject Indexing

• Are all facets of the content of each article indexed?
• How many index terms are assigned to each record?
• How thorough is the indexing?
• Do indexes provide unique access points?
• To what extent is the database's vocabulary controlled?
• Are subject terms used that are appropriate to the discipline?
• Is there an online thesaurus available to help the user formulate effective searches?
• Does the thesaurus include scope notes?
• Can you link directly from the thesaurus to a set of articles?

Journal Indexing

• Are journals indexed from cover to cover?
• Are journals indexed selectively?
• Are letters to the editors and editorials indexed?
• Is other editorial content included in the full text online? (instructions to the author, calendars, news)
• If journals are not indexed cover to cover, are exclusions documented?

Special Features

• What unique features distinguish this source from another?
• What is the image quality of graphs, illustrations, and pictures?
• Is a list of sources indexed available with the product?
• Can local holdings be linked to the database?
• Does the producer offer document delivery services?

Interfaces

• Is searching easy for average users?
• Are there both novice and expert search interfaces available?
• Does the interface have introductory screens?
• Does the interface have online tutorials?
• Does the interface have prompts and menus?
• Does the interface have function specific help?
• Is it easy to move form one function to another
• Is it easy for a user to access full-text from the citation?
• Are error messages easy to understand?
• Is there an easy and obvious way to logoff or exit out of the system?

Structures

• Is Boolean searching available?
• Is keyword searching available?
• Is full text searching available?
• Is index browsing available?
• Is weighted searching available?
• How are weights assigned?

Inverted Indexes

• What search indexes are available?

Vocabulary Linking

• Is there hyper linked searching capabilities?
• Can thesaurus terms be used without rekeying?

Truncation

• Is truncation available?
• Is truncation automatic?
• What are the truncation symbol(s)?
• Is word stemming available?

Positional Searching

• Is proximity searching available?
• Is there a method to search for littorals and stop words as parts of phrases?
• Can selected items be marked for later use?
• Can search results be saved as sets for reuse?
• Can a search strategy be saved and re-used in another database?

Search Limitations

• What search limits are available?
• Can you limit by full text?
• Can you limit by abstracts only
• Can you limit by language?
• Can you limit by dates?
• Can you limit to publication type?
• Can you limit to a single field?
• What additional special limits are available?
• Are there subject or publication format specific limits available? (Such as limit to human, animal, age, industry information, SIC Codes, newspaper headlines)

Search Display Options

• Are the search screens attractive?
• Are search screens easy to read?
• Are the search screens immediately understandable?
• Can users follow on screen instructions to begin searching immediately?
• Are the screens tailored to the needs of the user?

Results Display Options

• What is the default display?
• Can the user select and define different display options?
• Is local control of display options possible?
• Is it easy for a user to understand the different fields in the citation?
• Does the user need special software to display either full text or images? (Adobe Acrobat)
• Does the citation display with the full text?
• How easy is it to move through the display for both citations and full text options?
• How are images displayed with text?
• Can the search results be sorted for display?
• What sort functions are available for display?

Output Options

• Is it easy to download?
• Is it easy to email?
• Is it easy to print?
• Is the search history attached to the results?
• Can the search history be detached from the results?
• Can search results be sorted?
• Are citations included in the same record with the full text of the article?
• Are user defined record formats available?
• What formats are available for downloading or emailing? (ASCII Text, comma separated)
• Are those formats commonly used for importing into productivity software?
• Are there limits to the number of records which can be delivered in one segment? (e.g. First 50 in set).
• If you limit output to an initial segment of the records, is it difficult to select more records for output?