An abstract is a summary of an article, and can appear in an indexing or full text database. On the basis of an abstract, you can decide if the article is worth reading in full.

A bibliography is a list of all the resources used in the research and background reading for a piece of work. You may include a bibliography at the end of your own dissertation. Your bibliography is [..]

Your citation is in the body of your writing, and is the method you use to acknowledge the ideas or work of others in your dissertation. When using the Harvard system of referencing, this is usually t [..]

A database is a collection of items that can be searched at the same time. A database can hold many different formats – a database can be a collection of images, articles or even words and their defin [..]

An index is a listing of articles in a database relevant to your search. Depending on the type of database, you might just be able to get the abstract about an article, but not the full text of the ar [..]

A literature review is a thorough investigation of a topic and should include research from lots of sources that are relevant to your subject. It helps you to place your ideas into context historicall [..]

This is the process that scholarly journal articles go through. Articles are submitted, and then reviewed by academics or ‘peers’ to check it is academically correct and of s suitably high standard. C [..]

Plagiarism is where you use the ideas, words, theories or work of someone else in your own work without acknowledging them. This can happen intentionally (by cutting and pasting from an article) or un [..]

A reference contains all the details about the source you have cited, with enough information so that your reader can locate the resource. Typically it includes the author, year of publication, title, [..]

You use a search engine to search for information on the World Wide Web. Each search engine works differently; many send ‘spiders’ that ‘crawl’ pages following the links (usually the main pages of a s [..]