Lesson 4:
Conducting the Search

Objectives

Find Books

Find Articles

Find Call Numbers

Find Web Sites

Resources

Home

Help

Table of Contents

EWU Libraries

Find Articles

What is an article database?

Article databases work like search engines, but instead of containing information about web sites, article databases include information about articles and sometimes the full-text of the articles .

Article databases are created by companies that employ people to read thousands of journals and magazines and select important articles.

For each article that is selected, an employee enters basic information about it (like the author's name, the article title, the journal title, the volume, the page numbers, an abstract, and sometimes even the entire article) into the database.

These databases are sold to university libraries so that students and instructors can find out what articles have been published on a particular topic. For this reason, article databases are sometimes called library databases.

Note: A common misconception is that article databases and search engines are the same. Because databases are available online, students sometimes worry that the articles they find are really just regular web pages. However, when you search a database, you are searching within a pre-selected, controlled collection of information about quality articles. This is not the same as searching with search engines like Yahoo or Google that retrieve web pages anyone could have created.