Finding Articles: using Indexes
Finding an article is a little more complicated than finding a book. Although the titles of journals and magazines are included in the Bison catalogue, the titles of articles within the journals are not. That means that you can search the BISON catalogue to confirm that the Architecture/Fine Arts Library subscribes to Canadian Art, but you will not be able to find out what articles are included in each issue.
To find articles, you must use an article index (also known as a periodical index), available through E-Library.
In this section, you will learn:
Article databases are created by companies that employ people to read thousands of journals and magazines and select important articles. They are organised by subject or discipline, such as medical journals or art history journals.
For each article that is selected, an employee enters basic information about it such as: the author's name, the article title, the journal title, the volume, the page numbers, an abstract, and sometimes even the entire article) into the database. This information is referred to as a citation.
These databases are sold to university libraries so that students and instructors can search for articles that have been published on a particular topic. The universities pay a yearly subscription fee.
Note: A common misconception is that article databases and search engines are the same. Because databases are available online, students sometimes worry that the articles they find are really just regular web pages. However, when you search a database, you are searching within a pre-selected, controlled collection of information about quality articles. This is not the same as searching with search engines like Yahoo or Google that retrieve web pages that anyone could have created.
All databases are based on the same principles, so learning to use one database will teach you skills that you can apply to other subject databases. There are three types:
For Art History, the Art Index will be your first stop. The Art Index covers 500+ journals published from 1929 to 2008 on art history, fine, decorative and commercial art, and architectural history.
Click here to find out more about the Art Index database.
To find articles, you must use an article index (also known as a periodical index), available through E-Library.
In this section, you will learn:
- what an article database is,
- what information you can find in a database,
- how to search a specific database such as the Art Index, to find a list of articles,
- how to find an article that is listed in a database,
- how to choose a database from the thousands the University of Manitoba Libraries subscribes to.
Article databases are created by companies that employ people to read thousands of journals and magazines and select important articles. They are organised by subject or discipline, such as medical journals or art history journals.
For each article that is selected, an employee enters basic information about it such as: the author's name, the article title, the journal title, the volume, the page numbers, an abstract, and sometimes even the entire article) into the database. This information is referred to as a citation.
These databases are sold to university libraries so that students and instructors can search for articles that have been published on a particular topic. The universities pay a yearly subscription fee.
Note: A common misconception is that article databases and search engines are the same. Because databases are available online, students sometimes worry that the articles they find are really just regular web pages. However, when you search a database, you are searching within a pre-selected, controlled collection of information about quality articles. This is not the same as searching with search engines like Yahoo or Google that retrieve web pages that anyone could have created.
All databases are based on the same principles, so learning to use one database will teach you skills that you can apply to other subject databases. There are three types:
- citation only
- citation and abstract (or short summary of each article)
- full-text, where the article is available on your computer screen!
For Art History, the Art Index will be your first stop. The Art Index covers 500+ journals published from 1929 to 2008 on art history, fine, decorative and commercial art, and architectural history.
Click here to find out more about the Art Index database.
- The Art Index lists the contents of all the journals. For example, it includes all the articles that appeared in the Art Bulletin from when it was first published until 2007.
- The Art Index, lists articles citations and abstracts, but does not have the complete (full-text) article.
