First Year > Art History > BISON Basics > What is an article database?

Article databases work like search engines, but instead of containing information about web sites, article databases include information about articles.

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.