How to Find Articles

What information is included in databases?

Article databases supply you with citations for articles that have been written on a topic.

For any article, databases provide basic citation information including:

author's name,
article title,
journal or magazine title,
volume/issue,
page numbers, and
date.

Some databases may also include:
an abstract (or short summary) of each article, and

the full-text of the article.

Abstracts can help you determine whether or not an article will be useful for your research, but they should not be used as a substitute for the entire article.

Full-text articles are the same articles that you would find in the copyrighted print version of the journal or magazine.

What is an article database? What does a database include? How does one differ from the library catalog? From search engines?