Gale’s Curation Practices

When selecting content for Gale databases, the focus is on top-ranking searched subjects, topics tied to curriculum, social issues, people, and current events in the news. Special emphasis is also placed on diversity and inclusion, and Gale strives to include content representative and respectful of diversity and cultural relevance including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexuality. This includes content created and/or reviewed by subject matter experts and academics reflecting diverse identities and experiences.

Landing pages are edited by a staff of experienced editors dedicated to ensuring the credibility, relevancy, currency, and age appropriateness of content on the topics. Editors collaborate with a large network of contributors, such as librarians, educators, and in-field professionals, who are subject matter experts in their respective fields. Curation includes hand-selecting featured content so students and educators can quickly access some of the best and most authoritative content on a specific issue or topic.

When covering social issues and current events, efforts are made to provide fairly balanced and often opposing viewpoints on the issue. All viewpoint material comes from previously published editorials, opinion pieces, and commentary from a variety of publications, including newspapers and magazines. Gale strives to include a wide range of opinions, including those from differing political stances, viewpoints that influence lawmakers and policy influencers, and viewpoints that reflect current public opinion.

For our Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints database, all selected viewpoints are preceded by a commentary section written by Gale subject matter experts that summarizes the viewpoint, explains the author’s position on the topic, and provides contextual information. The commentary opens with a quote from the article and also includes guided reading or critical-thinking questions.

Gale biographies cover thousands of notable figures, including politicians, authors, artists, and athletes. We’ve expanded coverage of LGBTQ+, women, scientists, and historically underrepresented groups (like Latinx, Native Americans, African Americans, Arab Americans, and Asian Americans). Further, data from a million daily users informs editors of who is trending, which ensures the most-accessed content is also the most up to date.

Periodical publications—newspapers, magazines, journals, and government publications—comprise the core of Gale OneFile databases. Thousands of titles are selected based on customer feedback, advisor input, publisher solicitations, and general collection development research. In addition to aggregating reputable, high-circulation news, trade, and popular periodicals, special emphasis is placed on scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Gale relies on information provided by publishers and publication websites to determine peer-reviewed status, and consults other sources, such as Ulrich’s, as needed.

Open access (OA) content is included so users can incorporate this material into their research, while benefiting from the tools and ease of a single platform. International content of regional and global appeal continues to make up a growing segment of content. All titles meeting basic quality considerations—including adherence to stated publishing frequency and at least two issues of sample content in place of publication reviews or established publisher reputation—will be considered for inclusion. To ensure discoverability, every day we index tens of thousands of articles using trained indexers or sophisticated algorithms.

Gale is the global leader in digitizing primary sources, including historical newspapers; periodicals; books; diaries; letters; government documents; pamphlets; and visual images of maps, renderings, and photographs. Gale Primary Sources not only digitally preserves historically significant documents but creates text-searchable versions that students, educators, and libraries can use as a research tool. They allow broader access to the rarest and historically significant documents from around the world, covering topics from incunabula, or early printed books, to contemporary topics, like women’s history, political extremism, sexuality, and gender. As a pioneer in digitization, Gale has developed a comprehensive metadata and indexing process to ensure that rare and unique content is easily discovered:

For more insight about our Gale Primary Sources digitization process, check out our blog post “Behind the Scenes at Creating a Digital Archive—Technical Processes.”

As many of our publishing partners cover a vast assortment of topics, the subject matter of individual articles may occasionally fall outside of what we consider appropriate for certain school-age audiences. We leverage extensive technology to prevent the discovery of such content outliers.

We curate materials that are authoritative, age appropriate, and curriculum aligned, as well as respect the historical role of libraries as safe places for students to explore and understand their own concerns, like health and social issues or current events. We’re proud to offer young researchers access to comprehensive and credible information from a variety of sources through platforms whose search algorithms aren’t influenced by ad revenue or sponsored content.

For our academic reference content, we recruit academic advisory boards consisting of scholars and specialists who are led by an editor in chief. The boards define the scope of the work as well as recruit and approve the contributors and authors, along with reviewing the work once it’s submitted.