Research databases are collections of digitized articles, essays, reviews, books and other material. Some databases are subject specific, while others are more general in scope.
The following databases will help you track down political and governmental information.
Academic Search Complete contains full-text articles and abstracts to over 8,500 journals, making it one of the library's largest general databases.
Use the guided search feature to find citations and full-text articles in over 20,000 periodicals.
This database will help you find newspaper and magazine articles from thousands of publications.
If your discourse community involves a university-related topic, check out ERIC. It contains links to articles and abstracts from over 700 education journals, and many education reports.
To find relevant articles in any library research database, you'll have to use some strategic tactics. These tactics will vary depending on what you're trying to find.
In a keyword search, the database scans every article and every abstract and retrieves anything the contains the words and/or phrases you've typed into the search boxes.
Subject searching requires you to use specific search terms that have been assigned to articles in the database. Most articles have been indexed with a handful of these subject terms that best describe the topic of the article.