Dialectic is now in Expanded Academic ASAP

Regarding my last posting, Gale Cengage has finally added the vol. 64, no. 2, issue of the journal Renascence to their online library database. If you are on a college campus and your college subscribes to Gale's "Expanded Academic ASAP" database (check your library's website), you should be able to access the article by searching that database for "Dialectic of American Humanism" in quotation marks. Thanks, Gale! (But Gale still has not added the issue of Notes on Contemporary Literature that contains "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" to its "InfoTrac Student Edition" database. So a muted thanks.)

Library Databases: Negligence or Conspiracy??

My scholarly studies of John Kennedy Toole seem to have picked up some of the "curse of John Kennedy Toole," though obviously not as much of the curse as Toole himself or the actors lined up to star in the movie version of Confederacy of Dunces.

I published an article in the January, 2012, issue of the journal Notes on Contemporary Literature. That journal is aggregated full text in the database "Gale InfoTrac Student Edition." However, Gale skipped over the issue in which my article appeared (volume 42, number 1) and has gone on to load the two subsequent issues. The database "MLA Bibliography" from the Modern Language Association is also supposed to index the contents of Notes on Contemporary Literature, but they also have skipped over issue 42, number 1. Google Scholar likewise has not indexed that issue of that journal. So my article "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" is unfindable to those searching in online library databases. (Fortunately, it is mostly an extract from my freely available study "Evidence of Influences".)

Next, I published an article in the Spring, 2012, issue of the journal Renascence (volume 64, number 2). For this journal, the full text is supposed to be available in both EBSCO's database "Academic Search" and Gale's "Expanded Academic ASAP." It has become available via "Academic Search" (thank you EBSCO!), but the Gale database once again skipped over the issue in which my article appears. The issue has also not yet been indexed in "MLA Bibliography" or in "Google Scholar." ISI's "Web of Science" has also indexed that issue of Renascence (thank you Thomson Reuters!). So my article "The Dialectic of American Humanism" is available, but only in two out of five databases.

(In a side note, EBSCO created a decent abstract and subject headings for my Dialectic article, but I have my own unpublished abstract for the article.)

It's almost enough to get you to suspect foul play, though negligence on the part of the creators of library databases is the more likely source of the problem.