Library Databases

To access professional journals, you will often need access to a subscription database. However, some institutions (particularly institutions with more academic leanings) will provide their employees with access to these. Public libraries also often have access to many databases. Databases come in all shapes and sizes and are not necessarily just troves of quantitative figures and facts. 

You can view the transcript for “Library Databases vs. Google” here (opens in new window).

Finding Sources From Databases

If you have access to a library database, it can be a helpful tool for finding additional sources.

Subject Headings

Most databases will include related subject headings alongside each search result. Subject headings are a form of descriptive metadata. At their simplest, they may be tags chosen by the authors, but most databases use a controlled vocabulary assigned by professional catalogers

The advantage of controlled subject terms is that they’re standardized terms that will be assigned to all appropriate content no matter what terminology (or even language) is used by the author. For example, the database may use the subject heading “motion pictures,” even if the article uses the words “films,” “movies,” or “cinema.”

Whenever you find a good article in a database, check out the subject headings. If one or more of them look like matches for your topic, re-run your search using those terms—and be sure to specify you want those terms in the subject field. That will ensure the search results are really about that subject and don’t just happen to mention those words in passing somehow.

If more than one subject heading applies to your research, don’t forget to use quotation marks and Boolean operators to target your search.

Follow the Bibliographic Links

As long as you find one good scholarly article or book, you can look up the works cited in the footnotes or bibliography to find the sources it’s based on. Databases assist researchers by directly hyperlinking to research in the cited reference lists (even if it’s not contained in their database). This makes research more streamlined and accessible.

You can also follow citations forward in time by looking up who cited the work you found. Web of Science has cited reference searches.

If you find that a particular work has been cited by many other articles, journals, and books, it often indicates that it is significant to that field. High citation counts can signal the work’s impact, relevance, and sometimes its authority on a particular topic, showing that it has been recognized and utilized by other researchers or professionals in the area.