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An article database is an online resource that helps you find articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers. It is different from a library catalog, which tells you whether the library subscribes to a particular publication. The catalog can tell you whether the library subscribes to the New York Times. A database, such as ProQuest Newspapers or Lexis-Nexis, will tell you what articles are in each issue.
Some databases include the full text of the publications they index. Examples of these are Lexis-Nexis, EBSCO's Academic Search Premier, and the American Chemical Society's Journal Archive. Others, such as GeoRef, and Philosopher's Index, are index-only: they provide information about the articles, such as the title, author, where it was published, and an abstract summarizing what the article is about. Most of these have a link you can click to check the library for a copy.
The important thing to remember is to choose the right database for your topic, and to look in more than one database. Each database focuses on a different subject area.
Most of what's in article databases can't be found on Google, or even on Google Scholar. These articles, including most peer-reviewed scholarly research, are only available by paid subscription. The library subscribes to dozens of databases and thousands of electronic journals whose contents are not available for free on the Web.
While plenty of good information can be found using Google, SearchEngineWatch estimates that this is less than 10 percent of all information that exists online. Much of the remaining 90 percent is in databases like those available through the library.
This depends on what you're looking for. Some databases contain mostly newspaper articles. Others concentrate on a particular subject area, such as anthropology, biology, or nursing, and contain mostly research articles. Still others are interdisciplinary and contain a mix of scholarly research, news articles, and other kinds of information. You can look in our Research a Subject area to find article databases organized by subject. Or, take a look at our alphabetical A-Z listing to choose by database name. If you're stuck, contact a librarian for more help.
Start by choosing a subject on the Research a Subject page that most closely matches your topic. Each of these subject pages has a tab labeled "Articles" with links to article databases that contain articles on that subject.
For example, if you're looking for articles on cancer treatment, you'd probably want to look at the subject page on nursing. If you want articles from a caretaker's perspective, you might choose to look in CINAHL. If you're more interested in clinical trials of specific treatments, then you might want to look in MEDLINE.
Here are some tips for doing research in article databases:
Scholarly research articles have several characteristics that differentiate them from, for example, a newspaper article, a blog entry, or a website (though scholarly articles do sometimes appear on websites!).
Some of our research databases contain only scholarly research, such as BasicBIOSIS, MEDLINE, and JSTOR. Others, such as ProQuest Research Library and EBSCO Academic Search Premier, contain a mix of scholarly research and other kinds of articles. It's important to be able to recognize scholarly articles, and here we have a list of characteristics by which you can tell whether an article is scholarly or not. Once you've found a few, you'll soon be able to recognize them easily.
