Читать книгу Research: B2+ - Anneli Williams - Страница 31

A database is an electronic catalogue or list of published materials. Library catalogues are databases; however, library catalogues have two main limitations: they only list items available in the library and they do not normally list articles separately. If you only have the name of an article or you want to know what publications are available on a particular topic, you need to use another database. There are general databases, such as JSTOR or ArticleFirst, which list publications on a wide variety of subjects. There are also specialist databases which list items relating to specific subjects or academic disciplines.

Glossary

credible Credible means able to be trusted or believed.

Academic databases are very useful for essays, because they only include items that are ‘peer reviewed’, that is, judged to be academically credible by other experts. Another advantage of databases is that they often provide not just the bibliographic information about the article (the title, author, year and so on) but also a short summary of the article contents. This is called an abstract.