A RESEARCH INVESTIGATION OF A
NARROW TOPIC
COMPARING DIALOG, LEXIS-NEXIS,
EBSCO,
THOMPSON’S ISI, AND GOOGLE
The
purpose of this course, and this research project, was to examine, learn to
use, and compare subscription database aggregators that are beyond the scope of
those usually available in public and academic library environments. For example, although LexisNexis Academic
Universe and Web of Science are available through Buley Library, this course
provided access to a larger percentage of the total indexing output of each of
these vendors. In addition, for most
students, course access to Dialog and Factiva proved virgin research territory.
The
topic of food allergies is of personal interest to me, so I began the work on
this paper by examining what was available on the topic in the various
databases to be included. It soon
became apparent that one would have to narrow the topic considerably in order
to create results lists of a manageable size.
Since time was already a limitation in some of the available database
content, it appeared that a subtopic was in order. During my work in other MLS courses, EBSCO’s Academic Search
Premier has become one of my favorite research tools. The high percentage of full text availability has proven
invaluable in completing demanding course projects within tight time
constraints.
Therefore,
it is not surprising that the focus for my research came from an article found
using that database. The article,
entitled “Allergy: The makings of a modern plague” (Jackson, 2001), proved
intriguing, and provided an extremist view that facilitated the narrowing of
the topic and a formation of a research plan.
In
the article, Professor M. Jackson, of the History Department at Exeter
University examines the origins and increasingly uncertain scope of term
“allergy” itself, and the reality that symptoms and diagnoses that fall under
that umbrella direct the personal concerns of an ever-increasing number of
people, and the allocation of enormous resources in the form of medical
treatment, pharmaceutical research, and legislative focus. Apart from humanitarian concerns, the
research in pharmaceutical and other industrial fields is based on the
anticipation of profits, often realized in abundance. Professor Jackson also underlines that reasons for increased
social focus on a particular disease lie not only in increased incidence, but in
the social, cultural, and political utility of the particular disease. While past interests in gout and hayfever
may have been in support of continued class distinctions threatened by the
industrial revolution, allergy is being used to strengthen warnings against
industrial pollution and myriad components of modern lifestyle, and to bring
into question the rigidity of Western medicine which offers many sufferers of
non-clinical symptoms few answers, little relief, and what’s worse, frequent
invalidation. To make the topic narrow, and controversial enough, I chose to
focus on food intolerances, which is the area of food allergy that is, in fact,
treated with little seriousness by Western medicine.
Research
Questions:
The overall questions driving my research are: How
prevelant is the idea that allergies, specifically food allergies, and even
more specifically food intolerances, are becoming a “plague”? Besides Jackson, what other individuals or
groups, if any, are espousing the idea?
On the other hand, is there strong resistance to the notion,
particularly in regards to food intolerance?
Given Jackson’s preoccupation with semantics in his
article, it actually seems strange that he chose to use the word “plague”. Looking at the definition in Merriam-Webster
Online Dictionary at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
it seems doubtful that the term, as used in regards to a disease, can be
accurately applied to food allergies.
There is no indication that it is “a virulent contagious febrile disease
that is caused by a bacterium”, and though an increasing number of people
suffer dangerous anaphylactic reaction to various foods, the resultant deaths
hardly meet the parameters of “an epidemic disease causing a high rate of
mortality”. The word is certainly an
attention grabber, and that is probably the point when it is used in a
publication. The word “epidemic” is
probably a more accurate term in relation to the content of the article. Statistics are given that support “sudden
rapid spread”, a tendency “to affect many individuals with a population,
community, or region at the same time”, and perhaps even “excessively
prevalent”.
One way to measure the prevalence of the idea is to
look at the occurrence of the terms in tandem within publications. I will include the term [epidemic] as well
as the term [plague] for the reasons outlined above, and in the interests of
creating manageable results lists, concentrate for the most part on their
occurrence with the very specific [food intolerances]. Some of the databases to be examined are
very helpful in that they allow the researcher to specify just how close the
terms need to be.
The availability of, and instruction given,
concerning ISI’s Journal Citation Reports allows examination of the journal in
which Jackson’s article appears in regards to its impact in the field to which
it applies. The fact that the ISI
products are based on citation indexing makes it easy to use Web of Science to
determine the impact of the article itself, and the output of the author. This particular focus to research is
something I have not done before.
LexisNexis will allow a look at the appearance or non-appearance of the
idea in the popular press. The subject
indexing there will also facilitate a quick gauge of how this topic may be
affecting political discussion and the course of government regulation. Dialog will no doubt turn up some of the
same newspaper articles as LexisNexis, but will also allow a more in-depth
search into more scholarly publications.
A comparative examination of these aggregators will be made in regards
to their ease of use, the research focus they facilitate, and the results
content obtained. In this latter
regard, results obtained from ISI’s Web of Science, from EBSCO, and from a
search on Google will also be included.
The Journal Citation Reports can be commended for
placing an “Information for New Users” link at the center of their Webpage
preceded only by logo graphics.
Unfortunately, it has been shown that users rarely take the time to read
such information, and this database does not improve the odds with their far
from concise help pages. Users may
therefore not reap the full advantage of information available in this source,
but the well-designed interface makes much of the information readily available
through intuitive point and click usage.
In the case of my research, I am interested in the
impact of Clinical and Experimental Allergy. Choosing “search for a
particular journal”, I can enter the title, or a portion thereof, to
immediately view a condensed report on the journal’s impact, which is listed at
2.947. It is very obvious here that the
journal title is linked to more complete information, and the user that bothers
to click on it, is offered complete publishing information, and by scrolling,
what is probably more important, the formulas behind the various figures. My only wish would be that this complete
information appear in the initial search rather than requiring an additional
click, but it does make sense in terms of a less precise search that results in
a number of journal titles.
A trend graph visualizing any changes in the
journal’s impact over the last five years is available though a button
link. Other buttons result in lists of
journals whose articles cite the subject journal, and journals that its
articles cite. The number of total
citations and these lists give some idea of the journal’s impact, and the titles
and impacts of other journals in the specific field and tangential ones. However, here the length of the lists plus
the fact that no result sort other than title is available prohibits a complete
or meaningful comparison. As noted in our instruction, the appropriate course
to determine comparative impact is to return to the main search page and
utilize a subject search. This,
however, is not intuitive, so a naïve searcher with exact title in hand
would probably stop at this point.
When one does continue to a subject search,
“allergy” is one of those available, and it is clear that of the 15 journals
within the subject category, Clinical and Experimental Allergy is a
highly respected one, with the second highest impact factor, surpassed only by
the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. When one looks at the broader category of
“immunology”, the rank of the journal in question falls to 26, but that still
seems respectable in a field of 116 journals.
The even wider category “medicine, general and internal” further
underlines the respectability of a 2.947 impact factor in the field of
medicine, where only 10 monolithic medical journals, including JAMA and
the New England Journal of Medicine, have higher impact factors. In these journal subject searches it is
notable that one can indicate more than one subject at the same time, and the
results can be sorted in a number of ways so that comparisons on several
different measurements are easily obtained.
The Web of Science has the same admirable
prominence, however unutilized, of help information. One search method allows me to research M. Jackson’s publication
output, allowing an analysis that goes beyond the cachet of his Exeter address. The address is helpful to use in the search
to distinguish him from other M. Jacksons.
A total of 13 articles are revealed in the five years of data available
to students in our class. A complaint here is that the total number of results
should be at the top of the page rather than at the bottom in small print. In that way it would be less easy to
overlook the existence of additional results pages. Professor Jackson appears to write about health issues from an
historical/social viewpoint and to publish them in journals like “Social
History of Medicine”, “Medical Education”, “History”, and “The European Journal
of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery.” Of the
thirteen citations only one is about allergy.
Professor Jackson is not a well-cited author. In fact only one of the listed articles is
cited by anyone, and that was a book review.
The number of sources he cites varies widely from 0 to 39. Unfortunately, the historical nature of his
articles means that most of them are not included in the 1998-2003 Web of
Science available to us. Of the 37
references in the article in question, only 3 of them fall in that date range,
and of those, two are books not abstracted in the database. It is clear that more than half of the
references predate 1964, that Jackson has relied heavily on books as opposed to
articles as sources, and that he is sloppy in his citations, not providing
volume numbers for some journals and rarely providing page references for book
citations.
In a situation where the references are not part of
the database, the Web of Science does often does not provide enough information
to clearly identify them, without at least further searching. In the case of book titles for example, only
the author’s last name, a cryptically abbreviated title, and a publishing date
consistently appear. If the author has
mentioned a page or volume, that will appear, but it is of little help in the
identification process. In the case of
a journal, enough information is available to identify the periodical source if
one uses additional search steps to decode each abbreviation, but the article
title, a primary source of information and evaluation for me, is not
included. For a further investigation
of references, a full text database that includes Jackson’s article is needed. A subject search of the Web of Science is
not called for in my research plan at this point, but there is a “find related
articles” button on the citation page that reveals 342 articles related by ISI
indexing. For my purposes, they don’t
look to be especially relevant, given that the top results include the
historical aspect of the Jackson article, and if one looks further the clinical
nature of many articles is off-putting.
Proceeding
according to the research plan, I use this aggregator to search first for
newspaper articles in which the term [food intolerances] appears with [plague]
OR [epidemic]. The search engine
specifics allow the searcher to require that the terms be in the same sentence
(w/s), which seems appropriate for the compound term, and in the same paragraph
(w/p), which seems appropriate for the intersection of all terms. The exclamation point is the symbol used for
multiple character truncations, although a series of asterisks can be used to
specify a specific limit. This
interface does not require the searcher to use truncation to indicate both the
singular and plural of a term since both are searched in any case, although one
could I suppose use AND NOT to eliminate one of them. For a searcher unaware that the plural is automatically searched,
the addition of the asterisk makes no difference to the results obtained here
except in the case of [plague*] which allows [plagued] and actually increases
irrelevant results. The only truncation
needed in this search is therefore [intoleran!] which covers [intolerance] and
[intolerances] plus the possibility that a relevant result would only include
[intolerant] or [intolerable]. The
following is therefore the complete search phrase:
(food w/s intoleran!) w/p
(plague OR epidemic)
Several
parameters, and many choices within them, are available on the search form to
limit results beyond the choice of terms itself: major story, source or various
groupings of sources, and publication date.
The default time limit is in fact 60 days. Even within this relatively
small time frame, many topics, such as the more general [food* allerg!] require
some kind of additional limitation, since nothing is retrieved if the
result list numbers more than 1000. Since I instead want to search the full
range of years available, one might expect a multi-stage search to be required,
but in this case, the search phrase alone is enough to limit retrieval to only
16 items.
An
examination of the 16 results, reveals that the chosen terms can actually
appear in close proximity within a news article while the result remains
totally irrelevant, as in two different discussions of medieval fairs, two
different discussions listing problems of the modern world, and in a “news
briefs” situation where the proximity of two stories allowed search
qualifications to be met. Changing the
connector w/s to w/2 or pre/2, which would seem to be allowable given
information in “search tips”, only results in search error messages. Removing the connector altogether, as in
[food intolerances] is successful in removing all the totally irrelevant
results, but it also removes two relevant ones. Therefore, in a situation like this, where a manageable number of
results has been retrieved, the natural response, which is to simply sort
through them, in fact appears to be the best way of maximizing both precision
and recall.
The
end result is that there appear to be seven news articles that comment on the
purportedly epidemic proportions of food intolerances, justifying my preference
for [epidemic] as opposed to [plague] in this search, plus one that actually
refers to the phenomenon as a plague. An additional two articles use the term
[plague] as a verb, so are not technically relevant, but in that they refer to
medical tests for food intolerances, they are certainly of interest. An
additional fact of interest is that, with the exception of the medical test
articles, all of the relevant results are from British publications, a locality
they share with the article on which this search is based. This is a possible indication that, what
some would consider an alarmist view of food intolerances, is, at least within
the years 1998-2003, actually confined to this locality for some reason,
perhaps merely an ongoing reaction to one particular publication. Unfortunately a possible driving force, a
London Times Sunday Magazine special allergy issue (1997) that uses the plague
terminology, and that is cited by Jackson, does not fall within the years
available.
Although some news articles contain mentions of
scientific studies or quotes from experts, they tend in general toward
unsubstantiated opinion. In the case of
my narrow topic, the current opinions expressed in Great Britain are divided
between those who consider food intolerances a serious problem (Byrne 1998,
Cole 2002, Dobson 2001, Purvis 2002), and those who consider the idea at least
a bore (Orr 2003), and at the worst, total nonsense. (Laurence 2002, Porter
2003, Shenton 2001) Both in this small
sample, and in a less restrictive search, opinion, as expressed in the popular
press is fairly evenly split.
If in the search, one removes the requirement that
epidemic be in the same paragraph, as I once did by mistake, the total results
number 75. Many more are indeed
irrelevant, but there are also interesting and relevant articles that discuss
both allergy and intolerance and merely do not use the word epidemic in the
same paragraph. Many are in the same
vein as those I already mentioned, but some take a different tack. For example, Michael Hanlon (2003b) offers
an interesting discussion of a number of exaggerated fears in our modern
world. What is perhaps even more
pertinent to my specific research question is that this accidental search
reveals that a large number of the articles use the term epidemic in
regards to another disease while mentioning a relationship to food
intolerances. At least eleven
different diseases or conditions are described in this way including, for
example, autism, diabetes, obesity, and irritable bowel syndrome. This both underlines the pervasiveness of
food intolerances as a main or tangential topic, and gives evidence that the
application of the plague or epidemic concept is possibly just symptomatic of a
tendency to semantic exaggeration, particularly in England, where most of the
articles originate. It should be noted
that the terms are often combined with qualifiers, as in “has reached almost
epidemic proportions.”
In
my plan to find articles indicating government and legal reaction to food
allergies and intolerances, a direct search of LexisNexis Subject Directory
categories is unsuccessful in producing articles limited to my topic, but if
switch to Power Search, instead of the Search Form I have been using, remove
the [plague or epidemic] limitation, I am able to get interesting results by
adding Subject Directory terms to the search terms [food intoleran!]. It is important to note that it is best to
only add one subject term at a time.
The automatically added connector is AND, and though one can manually
change it to OR and bracket correctly, this method is only intermittently
successful in retrieving results for multiple subject headings. I can only assume that more complicated
searches are very prone to create search engine error, a phenomenon I have
noticed elsewhere. .
|
SUBJECT HEADING |
NUMBER OF RESULTS |
|
Litigation |
5 |
|
Food Labeling |
73 |
|
Government Research Funding |
5 |
|
Congress |
4 |
|
Pharmaceutical
Prod Develop. |
4 |
|
Food
and Beverage Industry |
100 |
The
results found indicate that the topic of food intolerance is indeed permeating
the legal, government, and industrial arenas.
One example is a 1999 article (Somerson, 1999) that reports the
introduction of a bill to the Ohio legislature that would require health
insurance companies to pay for the treatment of food allergies and
intolerances, including special food costs.
The bill was a response to a parent complaint that the only formula that
their daughter could tolerate cost $1200 a month, which they could not afford
and their insurance refused to cover. Without further research it is unknown
whether this bill actually passed, but it is indicative that the problem is
being taken seriously in the political arena.
Also
this second search turned up a quote from a research lab giving strength to the
concept of food intolerance as a real phenomenon with serious consequences
beyond opinion and anecdotal evidence:
“Scientists at a
Yorkshire laboratory are backing claims made by Government scientists that
there are strong links between milk
intolerance and bowel conditions such as Crohns Disease.
The report, published by a Government
Advisory Committee, suggests that micro-organisms
present in milk are linked specifically
to Crohns Disease. York Nutritional Laboratories has
been testing for food intolerance for over 18 years.
Chief executive, John Graham, said:
“Our research
evidence shows that there is a strong link between food and chronic
conditions and yet
our findings are frankly being ignored."
In
my initial searches in DIALOG, I searched [food(5n)intoleran?] with no further
restrictions, and found huge numbers of results in many different files. The
narrower search phrase that I first utilized, and reported in the course
discussion, (food?(5n)intoleran?(20n)(plague OR epidemic) only found one, or at
the most two, results in each of 10 files.
However, I decided that I was actually not giving Dialog a fair trial,
and undermining aggregator comparisons, because that search phrase actually
required the search phrase required the terms to occur within a considerably
more compact section of text. In an attempt to create a closer approximation of
the search phrase used in LexisNexis, while using Dialog syntax, I reinstated
the same paragraph proximity of the two parenthetical statements. It is difficult to approximate the “same
sentence” proximity allowed in LexisNexis, given the wide variation in sentence
length. Rather arbitrarily, I decided
to expand the possible separation of [food] and [intoleran?] by one more
word. I also needed to allow for both
singulars and plurals, because it is done automatically in LexisNexis. The final search phrase then, in Dialog
syntax is:
(food?(6n)
intoleran?)(s)(plague? OR epidemic?)
This
phrase did indeed produce more results than the one that required a closer
proximity of terms. A total of 33
results over 22 files was produced.
Deletion of the numerous duplications left a total of 20 unique results. The following table illustrates their
relevance and relation to LexisNexis results.
Total Results
Retrieved
|
33 |
|
|
|
|
Relevant
Results Also in LexisNexis-A |
+
4 |
|
Relevant
Results Not in LexisNexis-A |
+ 12 |
|
Irrelevant
Results |
+
4 |
|
Duplications
Within Dialog |
-
13 |
|
|
|
|
Total
Usable Results |
20 |
As
noted in the table above, the Dialog search retrieved four good articles that
were also in the LexisNexis-A search.
(Cole 2002, Dobson 2001, Laurance 2002, Purvis 2002). Some of the news stories retrieved seemed
more objective and removed from the rather emotional arguments offered as to
whether food intolerance is an epidemic or not, though they of course did have
to mention the word in order to be retrieved. (McCallister 2000) Dialog’s access to journal articles
definitely produced more depth and objectivity. A long summary of a book
chapter in Datamoniter (Wholesome 1997) and an older article in Nursing
Times (Holmes 1994) give good overviews of the topic. Several scientific studies and even a patent
application gave credence, and sometimes, quantifiable evidence, to theories on
food intolerances. (Mild 2000, Ursin and Eriksen 2001)
(including
8 of the databases available through Buley)
It
is not possible to construct a search phrase in EBSCO search syntax that is as
precise about the proximity of terms as in LexisNexis and Dialog. Here one can only ask for the desired
intersection of terms. My search query
in EBSCO syntax is:
(food*
AND intoleran*) AND (plague* OR epidemic*)
The
lack of precision does lead to a greater percentage of irrelevant articles, but
at least the search phrase is specific enough to narrow the results to only 8,
even searched over all of the following databases: Academic Search Premier,
Business Source Premier, Cinahl, Eric, Medline, PsychInfo, Regional Business
News, and Sociological Abstracts. This
no doubt has to do with the size of EBSCO.
Although the EBSCO search engine gives access to a great deal of
content, it is nowhere near the size of the other aggregators examined.
The
eight results actually include one duplicate, leaving the total results under
consideration at seven. Jackson’s article (2001), which was the launch pad for
this research, is one of them. It is in
fact the only result that is available in full text, a fact that seems
somewhat unusual given my previous experience with EBSCO. The helpful Nursing Times article
(Holmes 1994) and sensitization study (Ursin and Eriksen 2001), which were
found in Dialog, also appear here, which is not surprising since Medline is
available through both.
The
other four articles, although they meet search phrase qualifications, are
really irrelevant to the content I am seeking.
As was noted in LexisNexis Search II, the term [epidemic] is actually
often applied to other conditions: diabetis, obesity, heart disease, and AIDS
in the case of the remaining four articles. These articles are even more irrelevant
than many of the LexisNexis Search II results in that the less precise terms
allow the term [toleran*] to also be unconnected to the term food. In other words, these four articles are not
about food intolerances at all. Given
the quality of content in EBSCO, these four articles are at least citations and
abstracts of original study reports. In contrast, most of what one finds in
LexisNexis is a news report about the study report, often without enough
bibliographic information to locate the original work.
Google can be very helpful in finding quality
information if one is patient enough to play around with its capabilities, and change
strategy a bit when the one you are using is not retrieving the information you
need. If one tries to enter the same
kind of Boolean phrase used in the other search engines, results are minimal
and unhelpful. However, if one uses the
advanced search form, there is great improvement. Intuitively one would put [food intolerances] on the line for
“exact phrase”, but this in fact is unsuccessful. With that on the “all the words” line and [plague epidemic] on
the “at least one of the words” line, 817 results are returned. Weeding through the results one can find
things like:
An overview of food allergy and intolerance,
including some references, written by Judy Buttriss, science director of the
British Nutrition Foundation at http://www.studentbmj.com/back_issues/1001/education/367.html
A Focus on Allergies page at Medicinet where the
question “Allergy epidemic?” is answered by Alan Szeftel MD at http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/Art.asp?ArticleKey=15852
A
list of publications of the Epidemiology and Preventative Medicine Department
at Monash University (Austrailia) many of which are relevant to the topic. At http://www.med.monash.edu.au/epidemiology/units/clinepi/publications.html
Even some commercial websites provide thoughtful
information. The Nutriteam site
includes a discussion of foods allergies and intolerances, including links to
some studies at http://www.nutriteam.com/allergies.htm
The
relevance filters at Google are mostly based on the rate of traffic to the
result sites. In the case of this
subject, it appears to improve the quality of results at the top of the list if
one drops the [epidemic OR plague] terms and merely searches [food intolerances]. Using this strategy one finds several things
from reliable sources near the top of the list.
For
example information and pathfinders from the
British
Government Food Standards Department at http://www.foodstandards.gov.uk/healthiereating/allergyintol/
Midlands
Library (England) at http://www.equip.nhs.uk/topics/allergy/foodintol.html
Canadian
Lung Association at http://204.83.227.1/asthma/nutrition/intolerance.html
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/food.htm
National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, U.S. Dept of Health and Human
Services at http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/food.htm
Now
it is true that in either of these searches, one has to wade through sites with
commercial agendas, many of them for alternative therapies. There are also web equivalents of some of
the news stories found in LexisNexis and various forums. For someone who thinks they are suffering
from this, or any other disorder, the Web is actually a great way to get a lot
of information fast and to connect with others who are suffering as well. In
the case of this research, the full Web results are a way of gauging
opinion. To more efficiently look
for reliable and researched information the Google domain feature is
invaluable. One can first ask for just
.edu sites, and then for just .gov sites. Then all of the results found are of
the quality of those listed above.
In
my opinion, Dialog offers the greatest precision in searching. The unique ability to remove duplicates is a
great feature, given the large number of them found across the aggregators in
this search. However, ISI Thompson, LexisNexis, and even Factiva, although it
was not used here, offer much more intuitive interfaces. Users can conduct fairly sophisticated
searching, with relatively little study required. None of the Dialog
Interfaces
are usable without considerable study, because the command syntax there is
unique, even on the easiest interfaces like DialogWeb. Once it is learned however, the searcher
tends to miss its capabilities when searching elsewhere.
Thompson’s Journal Citation Reports
were an interesting novelty for me. I
can see them being very helpful for a professional deciding what journals to
read or where to publish. They could be
helpful in tracing the path of an idea, as I was trying to do here, but only
if a large percentage of the citations involved are recent and included
within the years and content of ISI that is available to the searcher. The author search was also interesting, but
I had no certainty that the list offered of Jackson’s publications was actually
a complete list, and examining the references in cryptic abbreviations with no
titles available was disconcerting.
Although the Web of Science can offer quality citations and abstracts,
there I miss the availability of full text.
Certainly in a public library, which I think is my destination, I do not
think it would be worth the expense. I
would be much more inclined to concentrate on subject bibliographies or
pathfinders to them.
LexisNexis
certainly
provided a lot of content, although it certainly leaned heavily toward opinions
short on facts to back them up. With
all the aggregators, I think the quality of content was improved if I dropped
the [plague or epidemic] portion of the inquiry. However, the results lists were then entirely too large to sort
through. LexisNexis offered a good way
to get around this with its highly available Subject Directory. Combining [food intolerances] with various
subject headings produced highly relevant and interesting results, allowing me
to verify the pervasiveness of the concept, something I’m not sure I would have
been able to do anywhere else. To use
thesaurus terms in Dialog is an infinitely more complicated process if one has
not already used Dialog extensively. Even if one could use the thesaurus in
another resource, or simply add terms to capture similar sorting, LexisNexis
gets high marks for making them so obvious and easy to use. Factiva, which I have not reviewed here,
also allows easy subject searching, allowing one to find much content that one
would not really expect in an economically focused aggregator. With either of these tools, the availability
of full text content makes for great efficiency, but the cost I think is
prohibitive for most individuals and institutions.
Dialog can also be an expensive
resource. I think the content is great
and much of it is full text, but the efficiency of the tool is totally based on
the experience of the searcher with Dialog itself. I know that in Advanced Reference I struggled for hours to find
the answers to assignment questions. In
many searches, Dialog would be preferable to LexisNexis for the more scholarly
content that it includes. However, in
the case of this particular search, the content in Dialog was not enough to
provide a full picture. As noted
before, more content was available without the [plague OR epidemic]
restriction, but then it was so plentiful as to be impossible to sort through.
EBSCO will remain one of my
favorite vendors as far as academic research is concerned, but it definitely
lacks the search precision, the enormous universe of content available, and the
ease of use, excepting Dialog on this latter point. On a research topic that has popular ramifications like the one
chosen here, EBSCO is not an adequate source.
The
Google search engine covers billions of webpages, and with proper use of
its advanced search capabilities, in particular limiting the domain to .edu or
.gov, it is very possible to find quality information on the Web. It is in fact, information that is
unavailable in the other resources, except perhaps in LexisNexis where I
noticed a Web search, although I did not try it. As such it makes a fine tool to use in addition to other
resources. One caveat is that even in
quality sources it is often difficult to find out the author of the actual text
in question, or the true date of its publication, and therefore it becomes
somewhat difficult to cite. Even with
sources like aggregators though, one is always not in possession of the complete
citation including volume and page number.
Do
food allergies or intolerances have the makings of a modern plague as Jackson
stated in his title if not in his content?
Given what I found in this research one would have to say certainly
not. Even if one downgrades the term to
epidemic, one would have to reply in the negative. It became clear in the research that numerous conditions are
referred to in that way. They can’t all
be epidemics.
Despite
the evidence, there are good quantities of people who insist on referring to
them in that manner. Many of them are
involved in commercial or medical enterprises, mostly alternative ones, that
are posed to profit from the sale of products and testing. I do not mean to
imply that these people are lying; in fact I think most of them are quite
sincere, but one would have to note the potential for bias, at least at the unconscious
level. At a deeper level the bias may be a concern for the earth. Jackson points out the connection between au
courant diagnoses and their social utility.
There
is actually real evidence that allergy and food intolerance are on the
increase, and that they are connected to other diagnoses. Political and legal discussion, legislation
and regulation, and successful litigation hinge on the fact that the concept is
taken seriously. The food industry is
being forced to adjust their manufacturing and labeling practices. They of
course turn around, and along with the pharmaceutical industry, try to profit
through the sale of new products that prey on people’s concerns.
Although
reasons for the increase in allergy and other conditions are of investigatory
interest, it would appear that the “epidemic” controversy is quite the tempest
in the teapot. The resistance to the idea is strong in the press, especially in
England where the health editors of several large papers have devoted numerous
columns to the issue. One could blame
it solely on the tendency of the proponents to engage in hyperbole, but I would
also point out that much of the opposition is irresponsible in responding in an
equally emotional way without an objective look at the facts. Another important point is what Jackson
refers to as the “semantic elasticism” of the terms in the field of allergy.
Much of the argument seems to stem from lack of agreement on the terms.
As
with most research, interest in the original question is replaced with interest
in new ones. I actually have personal
interest in the topic, so when a source indicates that food intolerances, as
opposed to food allergies, do not involve the immune system (Hinchcliff
2003), I react in disbelief, and want to look into that statement further. The idea that they are related to stress is
not so unbelievable, and it is not too far to go from there to admit that they
may have a strong psychosomatic component as well.
Theories
about the cause of increased incidence of food allergies (and other conditions
for that matter) abound. I had been
aware of those theories that point to “leaky guts” or to overstressed immune
systems that have become that way for a variety or combination of reasons. A statement like one by a health
professional in England that the increase is the consequence of the changing
environment, with more exposure to allergens such as polluted air or
antibiotics, together with eating a less healthy diet (Screen 2003) seems
fairly common.
On
the other hand, I had not heard the totally opposing theory referred to as the
“hygiene hypothesis”. Marc Hanlon,
heath editor of the Daily Mail in London characterizes it thusly:
“The most plausible explanation for any verifiable rise in allergies is
the so-called 'hygiene hypothesis',
first proposed about a decade ago. It is a simple theory. By keeping our young
children in environments that are too clean, their immune systems never get a
chance to develop properly. This means that later in life, their bodies do not
'know' how to deal with substances such as dust and pollen grains that may
enter the body. So they are mistaken for harmful, invading germs and the body
takes appropriate action.” (Hanlon, 2003a)
Now this theory does not sound as plausible as
its opposite to me, but I would be willing to admit that it might be because I
am entrenched in the idea of an overstressed immune system. It would be interesting to examine the
evidence on both sides more thoroughly.
REFERENCES
Byrne,
Kay (1998) Food fears are fueled by few fatal reactions. South Wales Evening
Post, Dec 8, 1998, p. 6. (From LexisNexis-B)
Cole,
Bethan (2002) When drugs don’t work. The Independent (London), Jan 19,
2002, p. 13-15. (From both LexisNexis-A and Dialog)
Dobson,
Roger (2001) I just can’t eat that stuff. The Independent (London), Nov
7, 2001, p. not supplied. (From both LexisNexis-A and Dialog)
Hanlon, Marc (2003a) Allergy: Epidemic
or modern myth? Daily Mail (London), June 25, 2003, p. 14. (From
LexisNexis-B)
Hanlon, Marc (2003b) Scared to death? Daily
Mail (London), June 16, 2003, p. 36. (From LexisNexis-B)
Hinchliffe,
Nigel (2003) Gut reaction. Bristol Evening Post (England), Jan 5, 2003,
Food Section, p. 15. (From
LexisNexis-B)
Holmes
S. (1994) Food intolerance defined. Nursing Times (England), Oct
19-25 1994, v.90 (42) p. 33-5.
Jackson,
M (2001) Allergy: The makings of a modern plague. Clinical and Experimental
Allergy,
v.31, p.
1665-1671. (From Academic Search Premier through Buley and available in
LexisNexis in an author search – but not through search phrases constructed.)
Laurance, Jeremy (2002) Millions falsely
believe they have food allergies. The Observer (London), Feb 10, 2002,
p. 31. (From LexisNexis-A and Dialog)
McAllister, Rallie, MD (2000) Learning to live with
a food allergy. Cincinnati Post, September 1, 2000, 9C. (From Dialog)
(No author) Mild reactions triggered in IGTC-backed
MSG challenge study. (2000) Food Chemical News, October 2000, v 36, n
21, p N/A.
(Collection of articles) The modern plague: special
allergy issue. The Sunday Times Magazine (London), Oct 19, 1997, p.
14. (From Jackson’s article and
examined in microfilm format at the University of Washington Suzallo
Library.)
Orr, Deborah (2003) Can anyone explain this increase
in allergies? What a bore it is…The
Independent (London) June 27, 2003, p. 15. (From LexisNexis-B)
Porter, Marc MD (2003) What’s up doc? Radio
Times (England) March 22, 2003, p. 40. (From LexisNexis-A)
Purvis, Andrew (2002) Food debate: No such thing as
a safe lunch. The Observer (London) Feb 10, 2002, p. 31. (From
LexisNexis-A and Dialog)
Scott, Nigel (2001) Scientists back milk link with
illness. Yorkshire Post (England), Dec 10, 2001 (no page given). (From
LexisNexis-B)
(No author) Screen tests for sensitive
creatures. (2003) The Sentinel (England), July 6, 2003, p. 16 (From
LexisNexis-B)
Shenton, John (2001) I just cant’ eat
that stuff. The Independent (London) Nov 7, 2001, p. 9. (From
LexisNexis-A)
Somerson, Mark (1999) Allergic toddler
at center of health care dilemma. Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), Oct 31,
1999, News-Insight, p. 7B. (From LexisNexis-B)
Ursin,
H.R and Eriksen, H. (2001) Sensitization, subjective health complaints,
and sustained arousal. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (United
States) Mar 2001, v.933 p. 119-29. (From Dialog)
(No author given) Wholesome dynamics
(1997) Chapter 6 in Health and Functional Foods in Europe, January 1,
1997