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What types of research databases are available?

Bibliographic databases are databases that contain citations to publications, such as journal articles, books, or dissertations. Some bibliographic databases may also provide abstracts, or brief summaries, for each article. Reading these abstracts may help you decide if the article is relevant to your research, before you try to locate the original article. Bibliographic databases can usually be searched by subject, author, and keywords. Each citation includes enough basic information about an item for you to be able to locate it in your own library or obtain it from another library through Inter Library Loan.

Bibliographic databases are grouped in two broad types:

General databases

include a wide range of topics and a mix of

popular

and

scholarly

literature.
Examples:

Essay and General Literature Index
Newspaper Abstracts
Periodical Abstracts
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, in print, for articles published before the 1980s.

Subject databases

cover a more narrow range of topics, often focusing on a single discipline. These databases are often limited to scholarly publications.
Examples:

Full-text databases are similar to bibliographic databases: in addition to citations, they include the actual content of the item referred to in the citation.

Examples:

Image databases are databases that contain visual information, such as illustrations, artwork, photographs. Records for images included in the database may have additional information, to make it possible to search by subject, artist, or date of creation.

Examples:

Numeric databases are databases that contain primarily statistical data. They may require knowledge of specific software that enables the user to extract specific information and display it in different ways, such as in tables, charts, or graphs.