What Will An Article Database Do and Why Use One?

An article database helps you to quickly track down useful articles for research projects. When you search an online article database, it quickly searches thousands of journals, magazines and newspapers to find articles which match your search terms.

Otherwise, you would have to look through each issue of each periodical for articles on your topic. Libraries pay to subscribe to databases. Thus, the resulting information cannot be found freely on the Web and may be of higher quality as a result.

Use to get a list references to potential articles that match your search terms. Along with the title of the article, you may be given this information:

Citation: Although the index may not contain the full text of the article, the citation will provide the information that you need to find the article.
Abstract: It may also include an abstract or summary of the article's content. Reading the abstract, you can quickly see if the article will be useful for your topic.
Full text: Sometimes an index will link to the full text of the article. Indexes that include full text will have a "Y" in the Full Text column of the Databases & Electronic Resources list.

If the index does not include full text, you still can find the article in other ways: try the FullTextFinder link or search the Journals list by journal title to see if the library owns the issue you need.

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Last modified: Aug 05, 2008, 16:02 EDT