Databases are large banks of quality information stored for subscribers. Databases are costly some charge millions of dollars for a subscription. Therefore, individuals do not have subscriptions, instead libraries foot the bill. At a university, or any library there is access via the library website.
Although there are some databases on the free web, most are reached via a library web portal. There are some basic ways to use databases:
Keywords: are literally “key” words in the text. They include author, title, content notes and other important words from the text. A key word is free-text that means you type the words in yourself.
Subject: A subject is an assigned phrase or word to a particular topic. It is an authoritative listing. Usually you click on subject headings. These subjects hold indexed articles so you know they are good if they have been indexed and put into a subject. You can always ask your librarian for the various subject headings for your topic.
Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT are used in database searching to help narrow and refine your searching. You create a list of keywords based on your thesis topic. Then you search the combinations using the operators. For example; homeschooling as a keyword will get you all the articles in a given database that are about the topic. Now imagine how different the results would be if you used homeschooling and kindergarten. Can you think of ways that the OR and NOT operators work?
Database design: Almost all databases have citation generating programs. Usually you must perform a search. Mark your items then e-mail them to yourselves. In the e-mail window you can select to use APA or MLA in your mailbox, the citation will be listed according to what you selected.
Database interface:
Most databases have a portal page where you can select from numerous collections. There are also usually a lot of tabs once you search a subject or keyword. The tabs tell you the different types of material they have on your topic.
Databases always offer quality information that has been written by experts. The collections reflect quality and accuracy, which is why they are considered scholarly sources.
