What is a Database? - Prep
Introduction | Prep | Presentation | Activity 1 | Activity 2
Know five major interdisciplinary search engines (5 minutes)
- Web of Science Links to an external site. - A Clarivate product that indexes journal articles. It is especially strong in the sciences and social sciences.
- JSTOR Links to an external site. - Scholarly journals in full text.
- InfoKat Discovery Links to an external site.- UK's library discovery system.
- Academic Search Premier Links to an external site. - an EBSCO product that indexes articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers for all-purpose research.
- Google Scholar Links to an external site. - Search across many sources for peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles.
Knowledge check (10 minutes)
Of the 5 major search engines above, where would you go to find each of the following?
- Book reviews of an academic monograph published in 1960
Hint: which of the databases has a “reviews” filter option? Does its article indexing go back to the 1960s? Try using [give name of popular academic book from the time] for a test search.
Our recommendation: InfoKat or JSTOR. Check your library’s discovery system for book reviews: does there seem to be good coverage?
- Major journals in Film Studies
Hint: which database makes it easy to search only the top journals? Does that database have an option for filtering or searching within journals?
Our recommendation: JSTOR groups journals by broad disciplinary areas (like film studies), and is limited to well-respected scholarly journals.
- Articles about endocrine therapy techniques
Hint: which database is strongest for science articles?
Our recommendation: Web of Science will return the best results for science topics. (Google Scholar is also good for science topics, and especially good at returning the very latest publications, but it offers fewer tools for topical searching and it’s harder to evaluate the quality of the results.)
- Grey literature
Links to an external site. about your topic
Hint: grey literature is often published informally. Which database searches beyond formal academic publications?
Our recommendation: Google Scholar will allow you to search most broadly, because it includes results scraped from the web.
- Recent newspaper and magazine articles
Hint: Note that several of the 5 databases include only academic journal articles. Of those that do include other kinds of articles, which allow you to filter for magazines as well as newspapers?
Our recommendation: Academic Search Premier will return recent articles from a representative selection of newspapers and magazines. InfoKat does include some newspaper articles but its coverage is more inconsistent.
Note: Our recommendations are our best guesses. In most cases, more than one database will work for the purpose. The best choice often depends on the specific task, topic, time period, or region you’re interested in.
Introduction | Prep | Presentation | Activity 1 | Activity 2