The Library has a large number of print indexes and research or electronic periodical databases. These tools will help you to find references to articles which appear in magazines, scholarly journals, newspapers, conference proceedings and other specialized reports.
For older material (usually pre-1980), printed indexes are sometimes still the only way to locate references to the literature. Some databases (JSTOR, for example) do contain material from older years.
The online catalog lists the titles of journals. Individual articles are not listed in the catalog and cannot be searched there. Use one of the periodical indexes or databases to find articles on a topic.
Searches done using Google, or other internet search engines, do not cover the literature found in most of the subscription-based databases that you have access to at William & Mary. Results from such searches may provide articles from open access journals and some of our databases, but even using Google Scholar you will be missing a large percentage of the academic literature.
Research databases, which are also available by library subscriptions, are not freely available on the internet.
Research databases allow you to search by topic and to locate relevant articles. The basic information provided will be the title of the article, author, journal name, volume, issue and pages.
Some research databases are multidisciplinary, meaning they include articles from journals from many fields such as business, health, education, popular culture, and politics. InfoTrac OneFile is a popular multidisciplinary database.
Other databases focus specifically on the literature of a particular discipline or subject area, such as ERIC (education) and PsycInfo (psychology). Check the databases by subject list to see your options.
It can be confusing to decide which database to use. Also, the subject or time period you are researching may only be covered by print indexes. Reference librarians are the best consultants to use - check in person or use the Ask-a-librarian services.
Citation and abstract databases will only give you the article title, author, journal name, volume, issue and pages, plus a summary of the article contents. Your next step will be to check the library catalog to see if we have the journal. Click here for instructions on how to search the library catalog for journals.
Some of the citation databases provide links to online versions of the journals when the Library has a subscription to the electronic version.
Fulltext databases provide the above information as well as the text to some or all of the articles that are within its coverage. Graphics, images and tables may not be included.
Here is a list of research databases which have the text to many of the articles.
Electronic Journal collections often have a search by topic capability as well - as a group, or on a journal by journal basis. Keep in mind that you are searching within a special group of publications, such as publications from only one publisher. You are not comprehensively searching the literature of the field using this approach.
Examples of these collections are JSTOR, Science Direct, Oxford University Press Journals, and the ACM Digital Library.
