College Credit Plus @ BGSU

Databases are more structured than internet search engines, so they require an intentional search strategy.

• In a search engine, your search terms can match words in the full text or the entire web site.
• In a database, your search terms need to match words in the data that describe the article such as the article title, the journal title, and the abstract (overview) of the article, not necessarily the full text.

Thus, we recommend that you:

• carefully select the key concepts from your research question and combine those as keywords to search in a database
• use the worksheet labeled 'generating and combining keywords' below to brainstorm search terms

Many databases are specialized, meaning that they contain information about a specific subject area. For example, there are psychology databases that contain sources written by and for psychologists and psychology students.