Discovery Tools
What can a general internet search give you?
You can find quite a lot of information from a general internet search. Often this can be enough to answer a query at pre-university level or for your own hobby interests but it can be very limited in the both type and quality of information it gives you with regard to your university studies.
Search engines tend to give biased results. The search engine we all use most often is Google. When you search Google it keeps track of all the searches carried out on it from a particular PC or mobile device and uses what you have looked at before to influence what it finds when you type in a new search. If you are using a public PC the searches of the previous user will influence what Google shows you, this could be interesting if you use a public PC that lots of previous students have carried out many different searches on and explains why, when you say “look for XYZ on Google and you’ll find that web page” your friends might not find the web page at all.
Other factors that influence Google are where you are sitting, if you’re in the UK the results will bias what it shows you towards UK pages, even if the best research on your topic has been carried out in another country. You can read lots more on how Google's search works on their help pages.
Search engines don't index everything that's out there - there's a whole 'hidden web'. Many organisations and charities publish high quality reports online. For example a full text ebook of the work 'Claude Monet and his paintings' by William H Fuller in 1899 is available via the Getty Research Portal but you will never find it via a general search engine, you need to search the Getty Research Portal on The Getty's web pages.
What can academic databases give you?
As an academic researcher, whether you’re a level one undergraduate or a new postgraduate you need to think about how you can make use of databases to find relevant information. It’s helpful if you understand what librarians mean by the word database.
What is a database?
Formal information databases are collections of quality approved records about academic information on all sorts of topics. They can be:
- 'bibliographic'. If a database is bibliographic only it tells you that an information source exists but won't give you the full text. Think of it as being like someone telling you about an article they’ve read in yesterday’s paper, either online or in paper.
- 'full text'. If a database is full text it provides you with the complete information source. This is like your friend telling you about something they read and then giving you the full text of the article either as an online version or as a torn out paper cutting.
- 'combination'. If they are a combination of the two they might tell you information exists and then link to you another system to access the full text or they might provide the full text of some information sources and just bibliographic information for others.
Some databases are paid for by the university and are accessed via a commercial platform but others are made available free of charge by charities or government research bodies.
They can come from:
- 'individual publishers' like Elsevier, a major publisher of scientific information, who produce the Scopus bibliographic database and the Science Direct full text database within the SciVerse platform
- 'companies' such as Proquest who bring lots of different publishers information together in one place. The Proquest platform provides access to a range of Arts and Social Sciences databases
- 'research or government' bodies such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation who fund research and produce reports. These free databases are available from the websites of these organisations but you generally won’t find the information within them via a general web search, you normally need to go to the organisations website and search the databases individually from there.