RADT 000 - Radiologic Technology - Course Guide: Databases & Websites

What are the differences?

Authors

• Professionals or experts in the field

• Anyone regardless of expertise

Audience

• Scholarly readers - professors, researchers or students, professionals in the field

• Anyone

Authority
/Credibility

• Contain published works where facts are checked
• Authoritative, accurate
• Generally provide scholarly materials and/or allwo content to be limited to scholarly/peer reviewed content

• Content is not necessarily checked by anyone, expert or not
• Bias, reliability and/or accuracy concerns
• Cannot limit to professional, scholarly literature

Sources/Credits

• Provide all the necessary pieces of information to create a complete citation

• May not provide the information necessary to create a complete citation

Search Features

• Help you narrow down your topic or suggest related subjects
• Sophisticated search tool - allows limiting searches by publication type, data, language, format (book, article), scholarly/peer reviewed, subject heading

• Aren't often organized to support student research needs
• Simple search tools - may allow limiting by language or file type, but often can not limit by publication date, format, scholarly/peer reviewed, subject heading

Search Results

• A manageable number of results - can usually focus or limit as needed
• Dozens to hundreds of hits - broad searches may result in additional results
• Fewer duplicate results

• Often an unwieldy number of results - can often only alter by changing search words
• Thousands, sometimes millions of results
• Greater number of duplicate/repackaged results

Currency

• Updated frequently and include the date of publication

• May not contain current information or indicate when a page is updated

Access

• Available to anyone using a computer in a library that subscribes to databases or any library cardholder using a computer outside the library

• Available to anyone with an internet connection - the public web

Examples

• Academic OneFile
• Biological Science Database
• JSTOR
• Oxford Reference Library
• LexisNexis Academic

• Google