Library Databases
Library Databases Provide Access to Journal Articles
This modules is designed to teach you about the SFCC Library's research databases. Like all college libraries, the SFCC Library purchases lots of databases containing all types of research information (periodical articles, ebooks, images, streaming videos, etc.). The information below describes how databases work and how you can access them to complete your assignment.
Some characteristics of library databases:
-
Information is curated: Library databases contain information appropriate for college and professional research. For example, the periodicals in databases like ProQuest are reputable newspapers, magazines, and journals. That said, some types of periodical articles are considered more credible than others; generally speaking, journal articles written by researchers have a the highest level of credibility of any periodical articles.
- Information is proprietary: Most information in library databases is not available on the free internet. In fact, if you find an article during a web search and are asked to pay for the article, don't pay. Just check with your library. These for-fee articles are either in library databases or the library will obtain them for you for free from databases in our partner libraries.
[There are some free journal article databases on the web (like Google Scholar and DOAJ) but they may not contain the full-text of articles from fee-based journals. If you only search these free databases and not library databases, you'll be missing a ton of important content.]
- Databases have citation generators: Use the automatically generated MLA citations in library databases, and check each citation to make sure there are no punctuation or capitalization changes required.(The citation generator places author, title, and other information into the proper MLA order, but it doesn't correct capitalization if a title is in ALL CAPS for example.)