Welcome to the Research Guide for Brianna Whitehall's ENGL 101 class! This guide should serve as a launching pad to discover the types of resources available to you through the library and how you would use the databases to locate them. 

Why should you use the databases when you have the Internet at your fingertips?

Not everything is on the Internet! 

For example, most scholarly journals are not freely available on the Internet. You're likely to hit a paywall that stops you from accessing a journal article for free on the Internet. 

Databases provide more search tools to narrow and refine your search

You can often be overwhelmed by the sheer number of results on the Internet and have difficulty narrowing your search. The databases allow you to limit your results by type of publication, date, and use keywords to narrow your search. 

No quality control on the Internet

Not all websites have editors or peer-reviewers checking and evaluating the quality of the information posted on the Internet. The library database publications do have editors and peer-reviewers who fact-check, evaluate, review, and edit the works.

Predatory Journals on the Internet

You may find journals on the Internet that appear to be peer-reviewed, scholarly publications, but may not be! They could be predatory journals that charge authors a fee to have their articles published even though there is no peer-review oversight. The articles may be of low quality or even scams despite the convincing titles of the journals. See a list of predatory journals and publishers at Open Access below.