Whether you’re writing a literature review paper, reviewing the literature for an original research study, or just reading up on the background of a topic for educational or research purposes, identifying credible, academically rigorous literature is essential. Scholarly writing is a conversation.1 In order to join in, you need to know where that conversation is taking place and what is being said.
Searching for information requires strategic exploration.2 In order to be strategic in your search, where you search matters as much as how you search. There are a variety of options for searching for academic literature, and the most strategic tool depends on what you need.
Library catalog
A library catalog is an integrated system for managing an individual library’s collection across a variety of material types in both physical and digital formats. The library catalog uses a discovery, or search, interface to make the library’s full collection findable for users (more on this in Searching the academic literature (Part 2), coming soon). Integrated library systems (ILSs), or catalogs, search broadly across books, journal packages, and other print, digital, and media items that have been purchased by a library. They also attempt to pull information (metadata) on articles indexed within the various bibliographic databases the library has purchased access to.3 However, it should be noted that the ILS’s ability to do so can be hit or miss. This is because each database lives on a different platform, functioning on its own system. These proprietary databases are not designed to be searched or crawled by external systems (including an ILS), and therefore the ILS’s ability to return items indexed within these databases is limited.
When to use it:
The library catalog was designed and is best used for determining whether or not the library has acquired a book, article, or other item that you want to access. It is also beneficial for finding reference materials (i.e. encyclopedias, textbooks, guidelines) that provide background and context on a topic before digging into research articles.
While the catalog can be used to identify academic articles on a topic of interest and may be useful for finding a handful of items for a paper, it is not the most strategic or effective tool for this job and should not be used for advanced research into a particular topic area.
Bibliographic databases
At the most basic level, a “database is a digital repository for storing, managing and securing organized collections of data.”4 However, definitions vary and functionally, a good definition is dependent on the need of the user.5 Bibliographic databases are designed for the purpose of researchers to identify relevant, high-quality research literature. As such, they are carefully curated collections of empirical articles, primary sources, and archival materials and are searchable using a variety of platforms (more on this in Searching the academic literature (Part 2), coming soon).
Each database has a different collecting scope of journals, news sources, or archival materials that it indexes. Some databases have a very broad scope, collecting materials in many or all academic disciplines. These are multidisciplinary databases. The most popular multidisciplinary databases available through UNL Libraries are Scopus, Web of Science, and Academic Search Premier. Other databases are very narrow in scope, collecting only from specialized sources on a narrow topic, for example, the Children’s Literature and Culture and Civil Rights Digital Library databases. The majority, however, are somewhere in the middle, with a collecting scope of materials in a particular disciplinary area, including APA PsycINFO for psychology and the behavioral sciences, PubMed for the health sciences, and ERIC for education.
When to use them:
Bibliographic databases are designed and best used for in-depth research on a topic when writing an academic paper. They should be used when you don’t know what articles might be out there and want to find academic literature to support your own academic work. When you need to find multiple high-quality empirical studies on a topic, it is these databases you will want to turn to. A full list of databases available through UNL Libraries can be found on our A-Z listing of databases.
Repositories
A repository is a digital space where researchers share their own research. Unlike bibliographic databases, which do the work of collecting published literature from established journals, repositories are places where researchers upload research materials that may not appear in a published article. The type of repository you may be most familiar with is an institutional repository that houses student dissertations and theses. But these repositories can also be used by researchers and research teams to share article pre-prints, reports, or other types of grey literature. UNL’s institutional repository is UNL Digital Commons.
There are disciplinary and interdisciplinary repositories not affiliated with a single institution that are used by researchers in the same way. You can find a list of disciplinary repositories through the Open Access Directory. Common multi- and interdisciplinary repositories are arXiv.org, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and Open Science Framework (OSF).
In addition to these, there are repositories specifically dedicated to the collection of data. These data repositories can also be found at the institutional, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary levels. UNL’s data repository is SANDY.
When to use them:
Repositories are very useful if you need to find a dataset or grey literature. Often, the supplementary materials for an article are housed in one of these repositories and may be linked to a publication with a digital object identifier (DOI) or other persistent identifier. Additionally, if you want to see what is being produced for an individual institution, the institutional repository is a great place to look.
This post is part 1 of a 2-part series. Check back soon for Searching the academic literature (Part 2), which will cover search interfaces or platforms, search engines, search algorithms, and AI chatbots or generative AI.
- “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”, American Library Association, February 9, 2015 https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework (Accessed February 18, 2026). Document ID: 890cccdc-cd7e-4973-981f-92baea71d2eb ↩︎
- ibid ↩︎
- Note: just because the library has purchased access to a bibliographic database, does not mean the library has access to the full text of every article within the databases. ↩︎
- Kosinski, M. (2024, September 30). What is a Database? IBM Think. IBM. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/database ↩︎
- Derclaye, E. (2002), What is a Database? The Journal of World Intellectual Property, 5: 981-1011. https://doi-org.libproxy.unl.edu/10.1111/j.1747-1796.2002.tb00189.x ↩︎