Databases

Subject or discipline-focused databases perform the important function of making discoverable the most relevant research literature available within specific disciplines or fields of study. For example, chemists or chemical engineers rely on the library database SciFinder-n. Psychologists or those in fields related to human behavior rely on PsychInfo. For those interested in scholarly literature about literature there is the MLA Bibliography. Those in health professions rely on Medline or PubMed. The database Web of Science performs the related function of telling users which authors in what peer-reviewed articles cited authors in previous peer-reviewed articles from thousands of journals across disciplines and internationally. The library provides an extensive array of Latin American Studies databases due to the strength of that field of study on campus.

Article databases function as giant bins of articles acquired from independent publishers of journals or newspapers, and searchable by keyword or topic, often with the ability to narrow searches to specific types of articles such as those from journals that are peer-reviewed. Broad examples include Academic Search Complete and Nexis Uni. Article databases such as Arts & Humanities Database, General Science Full Text, and SocINDEX Full Text target articles from publications in groups of related disciplines. All are good for locating a representative sample of articles, but less good in that full text from top ranked publications may be excluded or their most recent content blocked for several months to a year. 

The U.S. Congressional Hearings, the Digital National Security Archive, the Gerritsen Collection--Women’s History Online 1543-1945, the Black Studies Center including Schomberg Studies on the Black Experience, and a group of collections individually acquired but representing nearly all books published in the United States during the 17th through 19th centuries and Britain during most of the 15th through 18th centuries. Recent acquisitions have included British Foreign Office Files from the Middle East and several large collections related to gender and sexuality such as Archives of Sexuality and Gender, LGBT Thought & Culture, and Sex & Sexuality: Research Collections from The Kinsey Institute. Over the past decade, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library has acquired hundreds of licensed digital archival collections that can each represent in size the contents of a typical physical archive. These collections offer important research opportunities for Tulane students and faculty.