Topic 3: Subject Indexes and Databases

So far your work in the Information Literacy Tutorial 2 has focused on books. Reference books provide overviews, definitions, and specialized facts, figures, and illustrations. Books in the circulating collections—located by searching ALIS, the library catalog, cover a wide range of topics in depth. This tutorial offers practice with indexes and databases. These resources will lead you to periodicals—journals, magazines, and newspapers—and sometimes to chapters or portions of books.

In Information Literacy I, you practiced searching databases for popular—or general audience—periodicals. Examples of these databases include MasterFile, PA Research II, and InfoTrac. This topic presents search strategies for use in finding scholarly sources. Scholarly sources usually provide greater depth than popular ones. Popular magazine articles are often written by journalists or professional writers, while scholarly pieces are written by specialists in an academic field or profession.

After completing this module, you should be able to –

· Locate useful databases for your research topic
· Identify key words and use them to search databases
· Conduct a Boolean search using nesting and truncation