What database should you use?
We subscribe to dozens and dozens of databases. Each is unique, yet there is lots of overlap, too. Many lead you to the scholarly literature in a particular subject area, like psychology or art history. Some cover several related fields, like Proquest Social Science Premium or Humanities Fulltext. As part of your work in your major, hopefully, you will be introduced to the most useful databases in your field. If you are ready to explore, I have been given a list of your majors and selected a good database to use to begin exploring in your field. See the list below. I think you can tell from the name of the database, which major it goes with! Business Source Complete is for all the School of Business majors, and Engineering Village serves computer science well, too.
To find more databases in your field and find out who the librarian specialist is in that subject, visit the Databases List which you can access by clicking on the Databases tab on the library homepage.
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- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new windowAbstracts professional and scholarly psychology journals and book chapters, plus dissertations and technical reports. The coverage includes over 1300 journals in 27 languages from approximately 50 countries. 1887-present. Updated monthly.
- Biological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowIndexes and abstracts the life sciences journal literature from 1980-present. Coverage is international, and includes biology, medical research, clinical studies, agriculture, biochemistry, biomedicine, biotechnology, genetics, botany, ecology, microbiology, pharmacology, and zoology.
- Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window1,700 full-text, peer-reviewed journals. 1,600 business trade and general business publications. Additional full-text non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses, faculty seminars (video) and more
- Communication Source This link opens in a new windowThe most comprehensive resource for scholars studying mass media, communication theory, linguistics, organizational communication, rhetoric & discourse, phonetics, and speech pathology. It includes the full text of more than 600 publications (academic journals, conference papers, magazines, and periodicals). Coverage goes back to 1915.
- Engineering Village This link opens in a new windowProvides access to over 17 million abstracts from Compendex (1884-present) and approximately 14 million abstracts from Inspec (1896-present).
- Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new windowEthnic NewsWatch™ is really two databases, a current one, beginning in 1990 and including newspapers, magazines, and journals of the American ethnic and minority press, including scholarly ethnic studies journals.This is updated daily with new content. The other database is a historical file covering the years 1959-1989, incuding a rare collection of over 30 full-text titles, focusing on African American, Hispanic American, and Native American presses from 1959-1989.
- Political Science Complete This link opens in a new windowPolitical Science Complete contains full-text for more than 520 journals and indexing & abstracts for over 2,900 titles, including top-ranked scholarly journals. The database has a worldwide focus, reflecting the globalization of contemporary political discourse. The database also features over 340 full-text reference books and monographs and over 36,000 full-text conference papers. The subject specific thesaurus contains over 17,500 terms to aid researchers.
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowThis database is a primary resource for accessing the latest research in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database draws information from an international selection of over 2,600 journals and other serials publications, plus conference papers, books, and dissertations. Records added after 1974 contain in-depth and nonevaluative abstracts of journal articles. 1963-present. Updated monthly.