It helps you create your footnotes and bibliography for your finished research. When it include subject headings those subject headings may be used to do another search to find other similar items. Some citation may be incomplete, i.e. they may not contain local library location information or they may use abbreviations. FULL Melvyl Library System Databases usually are complete with all the information you need to find items at UC Davis. For those citations which do not come from Full Melvyl Databases and which do not tell you if the Library owns the items you will need to search in one of the of the Melvyl Library System.
Some databases are catalogs of items owned in a particular place such as a library.
Other databases list articles which are included in a group of journals. The records which make up a database are themselves made up of fields and each field describes part of the object. At UC Davis we have two major collections of databases on the Internet. One is the Melvyl Library System and the other is our networked CD-ROM databases . The Melvyl Library System also has many other databases which list journal articles.