Searching Medline Finding Company Information Searching for United States Supreme Court Opinions Overview of Specialized Databases Databases containing public information or material not proprietary in nature commonly appear on the World Wide Web. These databases, many of which are maintained by government agencies and nonprofit organizations, can quickly provide you with a wealth of information that formerly was difficult or time-consuming to obtain.
Specialized databases are indexes that can be searched, much like the search engines.
The main difference is that specialized databases are collections on particular subjects, such as medical journal article abstracts and citations, company financial data, United States Supreme Court decisions, census data, patents, and so forth. You can find information in specialized databases that you often would not locate by using a global WWW search engine. A bibliographic database includes citations that describe and identify titles, dates, authors, and other parts of written works. It doesn t contain the full text of the articles themselves. Database A full-text database, on the other hand, includes the entire text of the indexed works.