Library resources have been vetted, whether by professionals working in the field, or by librarians responsible for evaluating material specific to that discipline. Public, corporate, and academic libraries all 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 required to ensure the data you find is reliable.
I <3 Google. Really. It is chock full of information!
But before you start using Google to find resources for a research paper, think about how Google works :
For example - the "Greek influence on the development of mathematics" is an academic topic. The results we'll find in a basic Google search are LESS likely to be affected by advertising dollars or click rankings.
If you use Google to search for greeks + development + mathematics, you'll see approx. 500,000 results. Looking at the results, you'll find many of the websites are hosted by academic institutions, which tends to make them more reliable. Also, there are no advertisements on the first page.
But! If you use Google to search for "cures for cancer," you'll see approx. 26,000,000 results. You'll note more advertisements; more websites created by individuals unaffiliated with hospitals, academic institutions, or health research organizations; and claims which sound strange, even to the layperson.
If you 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.
Search all EBSCO provided databases simultaneously.
Indexes more than 600 periodicals, plus books, research reports and proceedings. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s.
This database provides access to journals, magazine, newspapers, and trade publications as well as profiles on companies, people, products, and more.
