Web resources for sex researchers: the state of the art, now and in the future.

The World Wide Web is widely acknowledged as a treasure trove of information for research of any kind. Researchers at every level of expertise and interest can find Web sites to meet many of their needs, although not all--and often not easily. For sexuality professionals especially, the Web has proven itself to be a useful resource for education and research, and even for rudimentary counseling and data collection. Currently, however, this vast resource is not easily navigated and little of it is adequately indexed in any systematic way, although many specific sexological interests are nicely indexed, and sometimes annotated, in various links pages scattered across the Web.

As a result, finding useful information is often a time-consuming and arduous task, given that the amount of information placed on the Web continues to grow at almost exponential rates. The use of search engines, such as AltaVista.com and Google.com (my usual preferred search portals) is one way to find topics, although typically this strategy is a hit-or-miss proposition. Searching for many of the ordinary expressions encompassing the word sex, for example, is more likely to return a list of commercial pornography/erotica sites than relevant sexuality or sex research information. If you need to do something approaching an exhaustive search (which is no longer possible via the Web because of time limitations), a good site to visit is the Search Engine Watch site (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/) to find links to all of the major search engines, as well as a host of minor specialty ones, with comparative reviews and tips for better searching. There are, however, a number of good sexuality-specific Web sites that can provide effective starting points for targeted searches in sexology, of which several are spotlighted below.

Institutions and Mega-sites

One of the best sites for researchers beginning their quest for Web resources is that of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Their links page (http://www.siecus.org/links/links.html) provides a pathway to information of value both to the professional researcher and to students and the lay public. Ranging from activism to teen issues to religion to foundations and government and other organizations and statistics, the site is a must-visit for these and more on the Web. In addition, selected articles from the SIECUS Report are available, as well as their well-known annotated bibliographies and fact sheets.

The Kinsey Institute (http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/), housed at Indiana University, is another of the obvious Web sites for sex researchers to include in any exploration. It maintains what may be the largest special collection of archives and holdings of scientific, historical, artistic, or literary interest, and other artifacts related to human sexuality. The Library offers an online catalog of many of its holdings, which are noncirculating, but does not index its art or archival collections, although abstracts of some of them are available at the Web site. The Kinsey Institute also provides a listing of database archives--some online, but most not--with links to information about their availability, as well as summaries of its various research projects. Also available here are other documents about the field of sexology, such as di Mauro's 1995 Executive Summary of the Sexuality Research Assessment Project of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) (http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/SSRC /sexrealn.html), which addresses the need, barriers, and recommendations for sex research.

While the Kinsey Institute houses probably the largest primary-source sexology collections, others are likely to contain valuable sexuality data buried in their archives. The University of Idaho Library's Repositories of Primary Sources (http://www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other .Repositories.html) provides links to more than 4,600 organizations with holdings of manuscripts, archives, and other primary data sources internationally, many of which are beginning to provide online access to some holdings. Although the various listings encompass almost every imaginable academic specialty, they are not comprehesively indexed, and so the tedious work of sifting through the information remains the chore it has been in the past. However, the ability to begin a search of this magnitude in one place should facilitate what itself would have been a daunting task for many researchers, and will avoid at least one trip to the local library.

Many library Web sites offer public searches of their catalogs as well. One of the best is the U.S. Library of Congress's Services for Researchers (http://lcweb.loc.gov /rr/), which includes countless sexuality titles in various print and audiovisual formats. They also provide direct searches of numerous university library catalogs, although access to some resources, like online access to journals and databases, is typically restricted to students and faculty of the institution. In one fortuitous excursion combining a search of their catalogs and Google.com, I found Sex Research: Early Literature from Statistics to Erotica among the microform literature at the University of Toronto Library, a 1983, 120-reel set based on the Kinsey Institute Collection containing 977 titles from the years 1700 to 1860, with limited works from the 18th and 19th centuries. The works, in English and French, included the topics of sex and literature; sexual behavior and attitudes; sex, law, and medicine; and sex and the humanities. This illustrates the element of discovery inherent in doing any type of research on the Web as the user finds unexpected sources or other ways of thinking about and searching for data. But, it does take time.

The best Web sites for research, however, are those that offer substantive articles at their site in addition to a good set of links. For a vast repository of sexuality documents on the Web, few compare with the Society for Human Sexuality (http://www.sexuality.org/), which originated as a student organization at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1995. Although its focus is on various kinds of social play parties and other events on the West Coast, its online library covers a wide range of topics and lifestyles, including polyamory and swinging, same-sex relationships, sex workers, BDSM and fetishes, sex toys, and safe sex, among many others. As such, the researcher will have access to summaries (often first-person and activist-oriented) about these issues, as well as links to various organizations, both in its home areas and nationally. An outstanding site for students researching human sexuality topics as well as for professional researchers interested in some of the perspectives presented, this Web site is one of the oldest to provide free access to a wealth of sexological information on a wide range of topics.

The Sexual Health Network (http://www.sexualhealth.com/), created by Mitchell Tepper, is another Web site of interest to student researchers as well as to the professional. In addition to articles about women's and men's sexual health, including pharmacological issues, sex over 40, infertility, dysfunctions, sexual orientation, and other topics, it provides information on sexuality and disability and illness, wherein its strength lies, as well as links to related resources and books. It also features a panel of experts who write brief articles around questions submitted by users, which provides the venue for addressing many of these issues. As the primary (perhaps only) Web site bringing together many of these issues in some detail, it is highly recommended.

Haeberle's Archive for Sexology at the Magnus Hirschfeld Center of Humboldt University in Berlin (http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/) is another of the outstanding Web sites for researchers; it is best used with a high-bandwidth (i.e., cable, DSL, or T1) connection because of its many large files. Its vast storehouse of information includes full-text articles by Haeberle and others, as well as the complete first three volumes of Francoeur's International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (1997) and Vern L. Bullough's Science in the Bedroom (1994) and Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia (with Bonnie Bullough, 1994). In addition, the site contains World Health Organization (WHO) reports on sexuality, a critical dictionary of sexuality terms by Haeberle, and other resources.

Finally, there is SexQuest (http://www.SexQuest.com/), which I created in 1995 on my New York University home page. It was one of the first, if not the first, such Web site by a sexologist. It included the posting of my master's thesis on sex surrogate therapy, fulfilling one of the Internet's original intended uses of providing a communications link among researchers to share information (see Noonan, 1998). In 1996, SexQuest's Web Index for Sexual Health (http://www.SexQuest.com/SexQuest.html) first appeared as the site's central feature, its aim being to provide a comprehensive listing for both students and other sex researchers of various sexological and other links, many of them not conveniently available elsewhere, reflecting both my interests and my philosophical stance of promoting balance and discussion of neglected, cutting-edge, or still-relevant-but-out-of-fashion issues and ideas. I strove to put many of the research reports and full-text articles that are strewn across the Web within easy reach of readers in a semi-annotated style by providing links to them in SexQuest's Web Index for Sexual Health (http://www.SexQuest.com/SexQuest.html). I invite authors who have such writings on the Web to forward their links to me via e-mail for inclusion.

Journals and Research Reports

Most sexological journals are not available online to the public at large, although some are available to faculty and students at particular institutions whose library subscribes to this service. However, there is a Web site, FindArticles.com (http://www.findarticles.com/), that contains full-text articles from some journals and general-interest publications from the recent past, which are searchable and available free to users. Among the journals of interest to sexologists, mostly under the subject heading of "Health & Fitness," some under "Home & Family," are The Journal of Sex Research, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, and others, all accessible by searching their site. One can browse the list of journals and magazines included, although I could not determine whether complete issues were available or just selected articles; a browse feature listing the table of contents of each issue would make the site more useful for selecting articles.

Other Web sites offer literature searches that may lead to free access or to various document-delivery services for a fee. Medical research reports and abstracts, for example, may be found on Medscape (http://www.medscape.com/), with some recent articles available full-text online for free. It also provides access to MEDLINE, a searchable database that allows you to order the article for mail or fax delivery. The American Psychological Association (APA) offers

PsyclNFO Direct (http://www.apa.org/psycinfo/), an abstract database of psychological literature from 1887 to the present. Individuals can search the database online for $9.95 per 24-hour period using a credit card, and order the full-text, book, or whatever through various document-delivery services if they do not have access to the original pieces. A number of APA journals and publications are available via the Web to their members at relatively inexpensive rates.

It will probably not be until the projected micropay technology is in place on the Web that smaller journals, such as those published by the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS), the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT), and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), will likely be easily and completely accessible on the Web. Micropay is a developing technology that will charge individuals something on the order of pennies for online articles, allowing relatively inexpensive browsing by larger numbers of people who cannot afford today's prices for full-text retrieval, while making it profitable for publishers to provide the service and providing a fair return to the writers and producers for their work. In the meantime, I would urge the sexological organizations to begin to provide their older issues of journals (that may be insignificant income generators) full-text online for the benefit of both member and nonmember researchers, perhaps after a certain period of time has elapsed since publication.

In the meantime, many journals provide at their Web sites at least a limited listing of tables of contents of their most recent issues, sometimes with abstracts and occasional articles. Among those are, at the SSSS site, The Journal of Sex Research (JSR) (http://www.sexscience.org/jsr.htm), which lists tables of contents for volumes 35 (1998, nos. 2-4), 36 (1999, nos. 1-4), and 37 (2000, nos. 1-4). The Society for Human Sexuality also contains extensive abstracts of JSR from 1989 through 1995 at its site (http://www.sexuality .org/1/sex/jsexrall.html). Also published by SSSS, The Annual Review of Sex Research (http://www.sexscience .org/annual_review.htm) lists tables of contents for volumes 1 through 9 (1990-1999). At the AASECT site, The Journal of Sex Education and Therapy (JSET) (http://www .aasect.org/jset.cfm) contains tables of contents and abstracts for volumes 23 (1998, nos. 2-4), 24 (1999, nos. 1-4), and 25 (2000, nos. 1-3). At the SIECUS site, their SIECUS Report (http://www.siecus.org/pubs/srpt/srpt0000 .html) provides up-to-date listings for each six-issue volume from 25 through the current 29 (late 1996-2001), with selected full-text articles. Other journal citations are available through the free online PubMed service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez /query.fcgi?db=PubMed).

An alternative, of course, is the recent entry of online-only journals, which minimize the cost of traditional publishing and mailing while maximizing the distribution and space available to authors (and multimedia objects may also be embedded in pages if needed).

The Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality (http:// www.ejhs.org/), published by the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, is the first for sexologists, offering peer-reviewed multidisciplinary articles on a variety of topics. Volumes 1 through 4 (with each volume comprising each year's articles from 1998 through 2001, and new articles appearing periodically in the current volume/year) are available 24 hours a day, and articles are selected through their tables of contents.

Data Reports and Data Sets

For those who are interested in international data, SexQuest is also the home of The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality on the Web (http://www.SexQuest.com/IES4/). There you will find updates to entries in Francoeur's (1997) cross-cultural comparison of 51 countries, The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (volumes 1 through 3), as well as additional countries that were not included in volume 4 (Francoeur & Noonan, 2001) because of space constraints.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Worm Factbook 2000 (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index .html) is another valuable resource for international data encompassing over 250 of the world's states. In addition to geographical, political, economic, communications, and other data as of January 1, 2000, the Factbook contains information specifically of interest to sex researchers, such as age distribution by sex, birthrates, ethnic composition, infant mortality, life expectancy, population growth rates, and other issues, such as the impact of HIV/AIDS, sex ratios, and total fertility rates in each country. The complete publication (approximately 64 megabytes) can be downloaded and installed on your hard drive or you can browse through it online.

In addition to reports of data on the Web, various datasets are available for statistical analysis, either directly online for free or with links to their providers. Among the ones I found recommended at several data sites were the University of Michigan's Statistical Resources on the Web (http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/stats.html) and the University of California, San Diego's Data on the Net (http://odwin.ucsd.edu/idata/). The Michigan site provides a listing by subject, such as sexual behavior, abortion, sociology, population, and so on, to allow focused links to the data. The UC San Diego site starts with data links to "442 sites that have numeric data ready to download," including many government Web sites such as the U.S. National Technical Information Service (NTIS), and "100 Data Libraries and Data Archives worldwide," with additional links to searchable catalogs and suppliers of data for a fee. The Kinsey Institute is also an excellent place to start for an annotated listing of sexuality-specific data archives (http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/datarchives.html), which includes a link to an alphabetical list of datasets and surveys related to human sexuality. Some of the links allow you to extract and analyze social science data online, such as the General Social Surveys from 1972 through the present (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/), and other databases through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/).

Finally, special mention must go to an additional site not cited elsewhere that is an outstanding resource: the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) (http://www.agi-usa .org/). AGI has some unique datasets available online and free access to a significant amount of their recent journal entries, including Family Planning Perspectives, International Family Planning Perspectives, and The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy. Most articles are available in HTML format (the standard programming language of a typical Web page) and the newer Adobe Acrobat PDF format (which gives you a document virtually identical to the original formatted printed page). The data services are provided through a unique Custom Tablemaker feature that allows you to generate tables from AGI's international databases, which can show comparisons in sex-related behavior among more than 100 countries. My students would call this "very cool," and I would agree. Because of this comprehensive availability of its information, the AGI site begins to approach the ideal Web site for sex researchers at all levels of expertise. I would characterize it as state-of-the-art for what I would like to see available for all of us to better do our good work in the near future.

As a convenience to readers, I have provided links to all of the Web sites contained in this article in SexQuest's Web Index for Sexual Health (http://www.SexQuest .com/Sex Quest.html#jsr01 for direct access). Enjoy your explorations!

REFERENCES

Bullough, V. L. (1994). Science in the bedroom: A history of sex research. New York: Basic Books.

Bullough, V. L., & Bullough, B. (Eds.). (1994). Human sexuality: An encyclopedia. New York: Garland.

di Mauro, D. (1995). Executive summary. Sexuality research in the United States: An assessment of the social and behavioral sciences. New York: The Social Science Research Council.

Francoeur, R. T. (Ed.). (1997). The international encyclopedia of sexuality (Vols. 1-3). New York: Continuum.

Francoeur, R. T., & Noonan, R. J. (Eds.). (2001). The international encyclopedia of sexuality (Vol. 4). New York: Continuum.

Noonan, R. J. (1998). The psychology of sex: A mirror from the Internet. In J. Gackenbach, (Ed.), Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, interpersonal and transpersonal implications (pp. 143-168). New York: Academic Press.

A selective review of Web sites by Raymond J. Noonan, Ph.D., Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York, Health and Physical Education Department, 27th Street and 7th Avenue, AX-13, New York, NY 10001; e-mail: [e-mail].