5.1: Library Databases

You will often hear about databases in academic libraries. Library databases are an important resource for researchers, both student and professional, and understanding how they work will make your library research in the future easier and more productive.

So what is a library database? A database is just a searchable collection of information. We use different kinds of databases every day. Apple’s ITunes is a database of songs to buy. Amazon.com is a huge database of products for sale. Even your cellphone includes a database of family and friends’ names and phone numbers. Library databases are collections of magazine and newspaper articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, and other kinds of digitized research material.

Different library databases contain different kinds of content. Most databases only include articles for a particular subject area. An example of a subject-specific database is the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL,) which contains the full text to over 600 different nursing and allied health related journals. Naturally, the CINAHL database would be a poor place to find English Literature or History articles, but would be excellent for finding high-quality articles for nursing or other health-related areas like nutrition.

Some databases contain only certain formats of material. ProQuest Newsstand contains hundreds of reputable national and international newspapers, but only newspapers—no journals, no book chapters. Films on Demand contains only videos. ACLS Humanities E-Book contains only ebooks. So be aware not only of a database’s subject area, but also of the kinds of material formats it contains.

Finally, a few databases are multi-disciplinary. This means that a single database might cover many different subject areas. These large multi-disciplinary databases are often the best, first stop when doing library research. ProQuest Research Library is an example of a multi-disciplinary database. You’ll find articles in ProQuest Research Library on a wide variety of topics, from political science and psychology to English literature and education.

Because databases contain such a huge amount of content, you will want to think about ways to weed unhelpful items out of your search results. Before you begin a database search, select any limiters that you’d like to use. Limiters filter out content that you know you don’t need. So for example, do you need articles from only a particular date range? There’s a limiter for that, which will weed out articles outside that particular range. Only interested in scholarly articles? Mark off that limiter, and all but scholarly articles will be weeded out of your search. While different databases may look different, the tools are all generally pretty similar.

One thing to note is that not every database or database record is available in full text. A database might contain hundreds or even thousands of different full text journals, but may also include article records where the full text is not available. These abstract-only article records may not be immediately useful to you, but most libraries have an interlibrary loan service that can quickly request the full text of the articles for you. If you have questions about using interlibrary loan and accessing items beyond your library’s collections, speak with a librarian.

Tip: Databases typically focus on particular areas of study, such as communications or engineering, and they can be enormously helpful for finding discipline-specific information relevant to your topic. But ask yourself if your research topic has a multidisciplinary angle and choose your databases accordingly. For example, if you are researching bullying in schools, you may want to do your searching in databases from a number of database categories, as the topic touches on a number of literatures: Education, Sociology, Child Development & Family Relations, etc. Think about the whole range of places where published research on your topic is likely to appear.