Gale Science in Context

A user-friendly science database with a mix of introductory reference information and access to scholarly journals, statistics and other resources beneficial to community college students.

What is it?

Gale in Context: Science (GICS) is an academic database offered by Gale (a part of Cengage Group) that brings together science-related content from encyclopedias and other reference works, as well as topic overviews, biographies, articles from scholarly journals and other periodicals, images and videos, and detailed experiments from Experiment Central. Topic content coverage includes the subject categories of: biographies, biology, chemistry, earth and environmental science, general science, health and medicine, math, engineering, technology, and physics and astronomy.

Quick Evaluation

GICS is a user-friendly database that is geared towards undergraduate college students in introductory science courses. It uses the same well-designed accessible platform as other popular Gale databases that students are often familiar with, such as Opposing Viewpoints. At the time of this review, it provides coverage for a broad range of 694 topics that can be browsed or searched via keyword. Once the user clicks on the Browse Topics icon, the view becomes a full alphabetical list of all offered topics. The search can be narrowed by using the Topics drop down field to sort by a specific sub-category. Once a search is executed, the results are laid out vertically in the order of overview and item type. The added feature of the Search Within Results box that is placed above the item type categories is beneficial for narrowing the search further.

The platform includes a number of useful features, including being mobile-responsive, a Topic Finder visual mind-mapping tool to assist with making connections between topics, a publication search, advanced search with Boolean operators and other limiters, accessibility tools, and the ability to highlight text with various colors and add personal notes. While articles and highlighted notes cannot be saved long-term via the creation of a personal user account option like that found on some other platforms (e.g. EBSCO), they can be exported, shared or printed during each individual platform session.

The Title List link takes users to a Gale webpage that provides downloadable holdings lists for all of their products. This page is geared more towards librarians, and it would be more clear for students if the information provided was only on publications available in this database.

Observed concerns appeared when reviewing the title list for GICS, including the extent of journal holdings with limited access to the full range of published issues (some with only one month’s issue). Relatedly, sometimes only portions of an issue is made available rather than the whole journal volume that may be found on the title list. In other cases, even when the full range of issues is offered, the publications could be deemed too outdated for current science-related research.

GICS is offered as a stand-alone subscription database or as part of the Gale Research Complete (GRC) bundled database package, which are both priced by FTES. As is common with STEM collection content, the database by itself is priced higher than some Gale databases focused on other disciplines, but it is still reasonable in comparison to other products (e.g. AccessScience, ScienceDirect). For libraries with the ability, the overall cost for GICS is greatly reduced if subscribing to the full GRC package.

Interoperability

Gale offers ways to increase discoverability and access of its content from a variety of user starting points, including integrations with integrated library services (ILS) / library service platforms (LSP), learning management systems (LMS), Google Scholar, and more.

GISC is available as an aggregated electronic collection for activation in Alma’s Central Discovery Index (CDI), although there are some known linking issues for the Gale in Context platform due to the issue previously mentioned of there only being partial content accessible from particular publications. For example, currently, the Alma link resolver is using match identifiers to these CDI records at the “top level” of the whole journal, which assumes the full content of volumes are available in the database. This sometimes results in Primo linking to content that does not actually exist in the database. Gale has started to make steps to correct this issue in their KBART holdings.

Gale’s products also integrate into any LMS that supports LTI 1.0 systems, including Canvas, via Gale’s Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) functionality.

Accessibility

Gale states a commitment to accessibility and conformity with WCAG 2.1, level A and AA. Its platforms are designed with a number of accessibility enhancements to improve user navigation and the reading experience. These include the ability to change the text size and display formatting options, text-to-speech capability, and language translation tools.

Privacy

A link to Cengage’s (Gale’s parent company) privacy policy is displayed at the bottom of the GCIS platform. The policy claims to follow California’s consumer privacy laws.