Nonprofit Organization Reference Center

Nonprofit Organization Reference Center is an EBSCO database. It is a good source for information on nonprofit organizations, and includes articles from scholarly journals, other periodicals, and books. Per EBSCO, this database has 262 full text publications. Out of this total, 172 are from the United States and 90 are from a number of other countries. The coverage provided for these different publications can vary substantially, ranging anywhere from a single year, to a number of years, to decades. Its basic and advanced searches are easy to understand and use, and generally offer useful results. These results can be easily displayed, navigated, saved, cited, forwarded, and/or printed. Subscribers can choose any one of a number of forms of authentication, including IP authentication and user name/password. The technical requirements for access are standard ones, and remote access is available. Its licensing agreement doesn’t include the price of the database, the length of the subscription, or the conditions under which the subscriber can terminate the agreement, but aside from these few concerns the conditions of this agreement are fairly standard.

The price of this database can vary considerably and is dependent on a number of conditions, including, but are not limited to, a subscriber’s FTE. The vendor provides little in the way of specific pricing and encourages potential subscribers to contact them for more information in this regard. Despite this admittedly vague and complex pricing structure, this database might be worth having if an institution has a great need for information on nonprofit organizations, as it is a good source for articles on that topic. However, that will only be the case if the institution can negotiate an acceptable price. Also, potential subscribers should keep in mind that articles and other resources on nonprofit organizations are standard in many business databases, such as “Business Source Premier” (EBSCO), “Business Insights: Essentials” (Gale Cengage), and “Emerald ‐ Business Management & Strategy,” among others. For example, a “Gold Rush” overlap analysis shows that of the 173 journals available in this database (as opposed to the 262 publications mentioned above), 64 journals are unique when it is compared with “Business Source Premier” (with which it has 109 journals in common), 125 are unique compared with “Business Insights: Essentials” (with 48 in common), and 172 are unique compared with “Emerald ‐ Business Management & Strategy” (with 1 in common). In two of these three examples the journal overlap is substantial, though not overwhelming. That being the case, potential subscribers should carefully compare the content of this database with their other business resources before subscribing. Also, this database would probably only be of use to institutions that have a persistent need for information on nonprofits, and a preference to draw it from a single source.