Bibliographic databases serve as comprehensive indexes tailored to a defined scope, such as a scholarly discipline. These databases provide access to a curated collection of academic resources, including scholarly journals, theses, dissertations, and book reviews, all organized interactively to facilitate their retrieval. In computational linguistics, disciplinary databases for both linguistics and computer science provide a vital complement to the conference proceedings, workshop papers, and preprints that constitute the bulk of CL literature. The scholarly journals feature in-depth, peer-reviewed research articles that delve into topics like language, linguistic theory, and natural language processing. Unlike shorter conference papers, these articles tend to be more extensive, offering comprehensive literature reviews and emphasizing theoretical frameworks and research methodologies.
Bibliographic databases reference scholarly research and review articles as well as books, book reviews, book chapters, newspaper articles, dissertations, etc. Use bibliographic databases when exploring a topic you don't know well. Their advanced search tools and disciplinary focus make them effective for subject and topic searching within a discipline. Direct links to full text may be provided.
There is no dedicated CL database for scholarly literature, so use a combination of language, linguistics, computer science and engineering databases for interdisciplinary coverage.
Google Scholar is a search engine which aggregates scholarly literature in all disciplines found on the web. Since inclusions are based on a search algorithm rather than human curation, duplicate results are common and advanced search options are limited. Use Google Scholar to find a known item or conduct a search where databases fail you. Because it is not based in a discipline like most databases, you may need to be more specific with keywords and it is of limited utility when doing a broader, exploratory search.
Academic journals typically contain a combination of peer-reviewed scholarly articles, non-scholarly articles, and reviews of new books. Articles relevant to CL appear in numerous publications but the journals highlighted here are especially prominent in the field. Browse the latest issues to keep up with scholarship in CL and NLP.