OneSearch - Library Databases
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Web Search Engines
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Types of Information Retrieved
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- Scholarly journal articles
- Magazine / Newspaper articles
- Conference papers, Ph.D. dissertations
- Books and Ebooks
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- 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
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When to Use
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- Best for college level research
- Best for academic research
- When you need to find credible information quickly
- When you are writing a research paper
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- 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
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Authorship
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- Scholars / Researches / Professionals
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Reliability/Creditability
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- Content is evaluated for accuracy and credibility by subject experts, researchers and publishers
- Content is reviewed and recommended by faculty and librarians
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- No review/editorial process with regard to content.
- Must evaluate each source by yourself
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Accessibility
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- Full text articles free to LRCCD students, faculty, and staff
- Library databases subscriptions are paid by the library
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- Information is often free, but some sites do charge
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Usability
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- 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
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- Millions of search results: not organized
- Lack of subject focus results in irrelevant
- No citation tool available.
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Adapted from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Paul V. Galvin Library.