SCAND 330: Scandinavian Mythology: Finding Articles

Bibliographic databases serve as entry points into scientific and scholarly literature, providing references to scholarly articles, but also to books and other content. Scholarly databases tend to be discipline-based, though some are interdisciplinary in scope. Such databases, and the records they contain, are assembled by information professionals, rather than being tracked down on the open web by a search engine.

Why databases?

Search in databases to identify articles, book reviews, books, and other resources relevant to a topic. A few reasons to use databases:

• Many databases include references to articles that are not to be found in UW Libraries Search (the preferred interface for books).
• Databases are often discipline-based, and allow searching of a body of work pre-defined by discipline rather than a hodgepodge of miscellaneous content.
• Advanced search features in databases allow precise, sophisticated search not possible with other tools.
• Database content is curated and more authoritative than information found on the open web.