Information Sources Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Guides to literature are tertiary information sources.

Primary sources report original work, and secondary sources such as indexes and abstracts organise primary literature. Tertiary sources help the user find primary and secondary sources: guides to the literature, bibliographies of bibliographies, and directories. A guide to literature describes the sources of a subject and how to use them, so it is tertiary.

It is not a primary source, and 'periodical literature' and 'patent literature' are kinds of primary publication, so those options are wrong.

Answer: A

DOAJ stands for Directory of Open Access Journals.

DOAJ, launched in 2003 at Lund University, is a community-curated online directory that indexes quality, peer-reviewed open access journals across all subjects.

It is not limited to agriculture or astronomy, and it lists online, not offline, journals, so the other expansions are wrong.

Answer: C

The document that is not secondary is the Thesis.

A thesis reports original research for the first time, so it is a primary source.

Bibliographies, encyclopaedias and abstracts are built from primary sources: they organise, summarise or point to information already published, which makes them secondary (or, for bibliographies of bibliographies, tertiary) documents.

Answer: A

The Universities Handbook is A directory.

Published by the Association of Indian Universities, the Universities Handbook lists Indian universities with their addresses, officers, faculties, departments, courses and other facts. A reference book of names, addresses and organisational details is a directory.

It does not define words (dictionary), list publications (bibliography) or give articles on subjects (encyclopaedia).

Answer: C

Manupatra is a database of Legal (Law) information.

Manupatra is an Indian online legal research service, with case law, statutes, regulations, tribunal decisions and commentary, used by lawyers, courts and law schools.

It does not cover mathematics, medicine or religion.

Answer: C

The answer is (i) and (iii) are correct.

Conference proceedings publish the papers presented at a conference, often reporting new research for the first time. That makes them primary sources and a way of making current research available, frequently before it appears in journals.

They do not provide only biographical information or only a list of participants; such lists may be included, but the papers are their main content.

Answer: D

The answer is (ii) and (iii) are correct.

Emerald Insight is the online platform of Emerald Publishing, a publisher (founded as MCB University Press) of journals and books in management, library and information science, education and engineering. Through it, Emerald makes its own e-journals and e-books available.

It is not an aggregator, which would host content from many publishers, and it is not a professional association of librarians.

Answer: B

The answer is (i), (ii) and (iv) are correct.

The EPWRF India Time Series, produced by the Economic and Political Weekly Research Foundation, is an online database of long time-series data on the Indian economy (national accounts, prices, banking, finance and so on). Access is by subscription.

Because it is subscription-based, it is not an open access database, so every code containing (iii) is wrong.

Answer: D

The correct matching is (a)-(ii), (b)-(i), (c)-(iv), (d)-(iii).

• Books in Print lists books available from publishers: a trade bibliography.
• Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory is a bibliography of periodicals.
• The World of Learning lists universities, learned societies, research institutes and libraries worldwide: a directory.
• India Who's Who gives brief lives of notable people: a biographical source.

Code (A) swaps the directory and the biographical source, and the others misplace Ulrich's.

Answer: D

The answer is (A) is incorrect and (B) is correct.

Web of Science, now from Clarivate, is a citation index: it provides bibliographic records with abstracts, cited references and citation counts, and links out to full text where a library subscribes to it.

It does not itself provide only full-text articles, so statement (A) is false and statement (B) is true.