Section Two A: Research Topics - Information Sources - Library Databases

Library Databases

Databases are organized collections of related information. Every database contains only certain types and amounts of information such as:

• Specific kinds of documents (e.g., journals, magazines, books, software)
• Certain subject areas (e.g., sociology, music, chemistry)
• Certain time periods (e.g., current, 1990 to present, historic)
• Records available in several languages
• Certain publication types (e.g., scholarly, popular, newspapers)
• Certain information available (e.g., whole article or just a brief description and abstract)

Record:These are the building blocks of a database - the articles or lists of articles that you find when you search the database.

​​Fields: Each record is divided into smaller sets of information called fields. A field is a single piece of information.

One familiar printed database is the telephone directory. It contains records of people and businesses, and contains the fields of name, address, and telephone number. Since the telephone directory is arranged alphabetically by name, it is also an index. Telephone books also have indexes to look up different calling areas or types of businesses, such as the yellow pages.

Libraries have numerous databases - some are in print, like the telephone book, but most are electronic and available on a computer. The library databases you will use in this course include the SUU Library Catalog, ProQuest Newsstand, and Academic Search Ultimate.

These databases allow you to search by author, title, subject, and other fields. For example, a search of the Academic Search Ultimate database for Utah and politics, found these records:

The record for the second item shows fields of information (field names are shown in blue, keywords in red):

Article Databases

The library pays for over 100 online databases used to find information and articles for your research. These include several databases of different types.

Databases are categorized by the type of information they contain:

• General or multi-subject databases have articles and information on many different subjects. These are good databases to use when beginning your research. Examples include Academic Search Ultimate and ProQuest Newsstand.
• Subject databases have periodicals focused on a specific subject, such as psychology, education, literature, etc. Examples include Communication and Mass Media Complete, ERIC, JSTOR, and PsychINFO.

Depending on the amount of information available in the database records, databases are also categorized as:

• Full text databases when they contain the full texts of articles. Examples include Academic Search Ultimate, ProQuest Newsstand, CQ Researcher, etc.
• Abstract databases when they contain citation information (title, author, publication, etc.) and summaries, or abstracts, of articles. Examples include ComAbstracts and Historical Abstracts.
• Citation databases when they contain only the citation information (title, author, publication, etc.) of articles. Example: MLA International Bibliography.