Information Literacy, Level Two

In ENG 111 you learned how to use OneSearch, the default search on the library homepage. In English 200, you will also be using library databases, individual collections of books, articles, and other sources. These databases can categorized as General Databases or Subject Databases.

General databases are resources with a variety of information from a large number of different fields. They often contain a balance of both scholarly and popular sources. They can be excellent starting points, especially for topics that cover multiple disciplines, but you may find that they give you more irrelevant results, from fields unrelated to your topic.

General databases can be found by selecting the “Articles and Databases” tab on the library homepage, and then clicking on "Databases A-Z."  This will bring up a list of all of the library's databases, with some recommended general databases at the top.

Subject databases are resources that focus on an individual field or related fields, like psychology, education or natural sciences.   Some examples of subject databases include PsycInfo, Communication and Mass Media Complete, and Women's Studies International. Subject database often cover their fields more thoroughly than general databases do, and often contain more scholarly information.. 

One good way to find subject databases is to explore the library’s Research Guide on the field that your topic relates to. You can find these Research Guides under "Popular Links" on right side of the library homepage. There’s a guide for each major, and each guide features links to the databases that our librarians think will be most useful for research in that field.

Because many library databases contain a vast number of sources  compared to the  books found in the "Books and More" search, it's often a good idea to make your searches in databases more specific, using multiple keywords and advanced searching techniques to get to precisely the kind of information you need.

When you find an relevant article in a database, the full text of that article will often be available right in the database. But sometimes, you may see a "Check for Full Text" button  instead of a link to the full text.

"Check for Full Text" means that the article itself isn't contained in that database, but it may be available in another library database. Clicking on this button will look across our library's databases to see if we have the article. If we do have it, you'll be taken to the article itself; if we don't have it, you'll be able to request the article for free via interlibrary loan.

Instead of or along with the full text of an article a library database may provide an abstract for that article   An abstract is a summary of the article, and reading it can help you decide if the article is relevant to your topic. But it's not a suitable source for citing in a paper, so if an article's abstract seems useful and relevant to you, you should look for the full article it goes with, and use that article's information to cite in your paper.