Database: an organized collection of information,
usually pertaining to a particular subject.

There are many kinds of databases. The most common type you will encounter in the Libraries is an online journal index. These indexes point to the articles published in magazines, journals, and newspapers.

Each year millions of articles are published in thousands of periodicals. Not all of them, however, make it into journal indexes. The companies that own the indexes choose which publications to include. When you search a journal index, you will only find articles from the publications it chose to index.

Journal indexes contain one or more of the following:

• Citations - basic publication information for indexed articles (author, title, date and publication name)
• Abstracts - brief summaries of indexed articles
• Full text - online copies of the text of indexed articles