Tutorial on Library Research

After reading the sections on this page, you should be able to:  

1. Explain the relationship between individual databases and database platforms.

It's important to understand the difference between library databases and platforms. This distinction is explained in the first section below. The next sections contains lists of all the databases and platforms that are discussed in this Guide. The lists are arranged in different ways to highlight the relationships between the databases and platforms and between the platforms and databases. Links in the lists below go to the corresponding pages in this Guide.

Some of the companies that produce library databases also produce platforms to host their databases. Some of these companies also host databases produced by other companies (that don't produce their own platforms). Companies that produce large database platforms include EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest. The name of EBSCO's platform is EBSCOhost; the names of the other two platforms are the same as the name of the company that produces it. One of the advantages of database platforms is that you can search all of the databases on a platform at the same time.