Library resources have been vetted, whether by professionals working in the field, or by librarians responsible for evaluating material specific to that discipline. All libraries offer access to these types of resources.
Like Google, library databases calculate the number of times a particular word or phrase appears in a resource's metadata. Unlike Google, the results you'll find in a library database are limited to vetted material, are not displayed according to click rankings, and you'll never see advertisements.
You are already busy! By searching against the library's collections, you reduce the amount of time and energy required to evaluate resources.
I <3 Google. Really. It is chock full of information.
But Google and library databases are very different types of resources.
The money-making potential for a given topic can seriously skew your Google search results.
If you decide you'd like to use Google for your initial search, please take this information into account. When in doubt, use Google Scholar. Google Scholar searches against patents/trademarks, governmental organizations, and the indexes and contents notes of peer reviewed material.
This multi-disciplinary database has records for nearly 18,000 periodicals - journals, magazines, and newspapers - of which nearly 16,000 are peer reviewed. It provides full text for more than 5,000 journals, and you can use Journal Finder to locate articles that do not have a PDF readily available.
Contains all information available on the journals and series on the Master List of Periodicals for the MLA Bibliography.
Social Work Abstracts offers extensive coverage of more than 500 social work and human services journals dating back to 1965. Produced by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the database provides indexing and abstracts dealing with all aspects of the social work field, including theory and practice, areas of service and social issues and problems.
(Replaces Sociological Abstracts) SocINDEX with Full Text is the world's most comprehensive and highest quality sociology research database. Its extensive scope and content provide users with a wealth of extremely useful information encompassing the broad spectrum of sociological study.Indexing and abstracts for more than 1,800 core coverage journals dating back to 1895. The database features more than 1,600,000 records with subject headings from a 31,000+ term sociological thesaurus designed by subject experts and expert lexicographers.
