3 Searching Library Databases

Databases are available on many different platforms but you will find that they all share similar basic functions. You may not immediately recognize where to find those options, but you just have to look around to see where it is and how it is labeled.

Some databases use a “controlled vocabulary”, which means that the articles have been assigned specific subject headings or descriptors from a thesaurus or authority list.  Your search strategy will contain both keywords and subject headings in databases such as the American Psychological Association’s APA PsycInfo database or the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed/MEDLINE database.

Some databases do not have subject headings and rely only on keywords attached to each article. You may need to use more keywords and try more variations for your searches in these databases.

One of the databases recommended for your class, the Web of Science Core Collection, is one of these keyword based databases.  It is a multi-disciplinary database that can be used for almost any area of literature. However, it also allows you to limit your search to one or more of the specific subsets, including Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Sciences.

Searching the Literature using Web of Science Core Collection database

Another “database” recommended for your class is the Google Scholar web search engine.

Searching the Literature using the Google Scholar web search engine.

Google Scholar is a web search engine that uses “Googlebots” (web-crawling software programs) to search the internet for material that matches its algorithms for “academic” material. You’ll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, university repositories, and scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar also includes court opinions and patents.

Even so, Google Scholar does not index exclusively scholarly, peer-reviewed materials, and Google Scholar may have more “noise” in its results. Google Scholar cannot filter out non-scholarly materials, so users must be cautious to evaluate the sources they find.

There is overlap between the content found using Google Scholar and the Library’s licensed databases. Google Scholar searches for online materials, including open access and licensed publisher resources, which encompasses a large portion of UNL Libraries subscription materials but does not include ALL of the content available in UNL databases.

Google Scholar does not evaluate or authenticate the sources in any way, and the results may vary in quality. The results may contain duplicates, partial or incorrect citations, translations, and even some questionable “junk” citations. But Google Scholar also finds potentially valuable “gray literature,” i.e., articles, books, and other scholarly material that have not been published in traditional ways by commercial, academic publishers, etc.

Use the UNL Libraries Google Scholar link, 

or manually set your Google Scholar preferences,

to have the “FIND ONLINE @ UNL” link show.