Journal articles are a good source of up-to-date and in-depth information (see Chapter 1 - Information sources). To find journal articles on a topic, you will need to use databases to find citations to the journal articles then check to see if the library has a subscription to the journal or not.

What's the purpose of databases?
The purpose of databases is to help you to find relevant articles, quickly. As journals contain thousands of articles, browsing their contents individually for relevant articles is not efficient. You may find something, but chances are, you'll waste time.

What do databases contain?
Library databases contain electronic records for journal articles, conference proceedings, government reports, etc.

In this tutorial we will use the database called SPORTDiscus. Each SPORTDiscus record represents one item and contains many fields. Use the title, abstract and subject headings to help you to identify potentially relevant articles.

How do we get from a database record to the actual article?
The SPORTDiscus database includes records for publications worldwide - we hold a small subset of those publications at UNSW Library. So, finding a record in a database is the first step, and checking whether it's available at UNSW is the second step.