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Political Science 301 - Introduction to Government: United States (Reese)

Database

Comparing Library Databases and Web Information

OneSearch - Library Databases  
OneSearch
  Web Search Engines
Image result for google images
 
Types of Information Retrieved
  • Scholarly journal articles
  • Magazine / Newspaper articles
  • Conference papers, Ph.D. dissertations
  • Books and Ebooks
  • Everything published on the open and indexed web
  •  Commercial sites (.com or .net); educational sites (.edu); governmental sites  (.gov); organizations’ sites (.org)
  • Few free scholarly journal articles and books
 When to Use
  • Best for college level research
  • Best for academic research
  • When you need to find credible information quickly
  • When you are writing a research paper
  • Best for non-academic and general searches
  • A good place to start when you are doing research: get a main idea of your topic, and related terms
  • Information needs to be evaluated
Authorship
  • Scholars / Researches / Professionals
  • Anyone
 Reliability/Creditability
  • Content is evaluated for accuracy and credibility by subject experts, researchers and publishers
  • Content is reviewed and recommended by faculty and librarians
  • No review/editorial process with regard to content.  
  • Must evaluate each source by yourself
Accessibility
  • Full text articles free to LRCCD students, faculty, and staff
  • Library databases subscriptions are paid by the library
  • Information is often free, but some sites do charge
Usability
  • More control over your results: user can specify advanced search criteria; full text, date, scholarly, format, etc.
  • Databases usually include a citation tool to automatically create a citation for the article
  • Millions of search results: not organized 
  • Lack of subject focus results in irrelevant
  • No citation tool available.

Adapted from the  Illinois Institute of Technology, Paul V. Galvin Library.