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Library Databases
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Websites (Public Web)
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What are the differences?
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Authors
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- Professionals or experts in the field
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- Anyone regardless of expertise
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Audience
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- Scholarly readers - professors, researchers or students, professionals in the field
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Authority
/Credibility
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- 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
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- Content is not necessarily checked by anyone, expert or not
- Bias, reliability and/or accuracy concerns
- Cannot limit to professional, scholarly literature
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Sources/Credits
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- Provide all the necessary pieces of information to create a complete citation
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- May not provide the information necessary to create a complete citation
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Search Features
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- 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
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- 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
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Search Results
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- 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
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- 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
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Currency
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- Updated frequently and include the date of publication
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- May not contain current information or indicate when a page is updated
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Access
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- Available to anyone using a computer in a library that subscribes to databases or any library cardholder using a computer outside the library
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- Available to anyone with an internet connection - the public web
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Examples
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- Academic OneFile
- Biological Science Database
- JSTOR
- Oxford Reference Library
- LexisNexis Academic
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