In addition to soeg.kb.dk, it can be a good idea to search for articles in the library databases. In the databases you have several options to limit your search to make it more specific. On the A-Z database list you can search for databases by either type or subject area. If you are in doubt or working with a cross-disciplinary topic, try one of the universal databases. You can read more about the different types of databases below.
In general, the databases can be described as follows:
ProQuest Central is a large multidisciplinary database with access to more than 47 subject-specific bases. You can choose to search in all the databases at once or select a specific one depending on your topic. The database covers literature within the following subjects: Business, Science and Technology, Health and Medical, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and News. You can find particularly useful search tips for ProQuest HERE.
EBSCOhost, like ProQuest Central, is a large multidisciplinary database where you also have the opportunity to search broadly in all databases at once, or to select some more subject-specific ones.
Scopus is a large multidisciplinary base with abstracts, citations, and some open-source full texts from peer-reviewed journals, trade journals, books, patents, and conference publications. Scopus is distinctive in their visual and graphic analysis tools that can give a good overview of your search results. Just press "Analyze results" when you have your list of results. With Scopus it's also possible to see how many times a given article has been cited.
Web of Science, like Scopus, is a citation database and contains over 170 million entries. Web of Science has a number of strong analysis tools that can give you an overview of articles and topics’ citations, active researchers, and relevant journals. However, there is also a lot of especially European research that is not indexed in Web of Science, and in this way, Scopus and Web of Science can supplement each other.
In the multidisciplinary bases ProQuest and EBSCOhost, you can search in all the bases they cover at once. This is also called a combined search. The advantage of a combined search is that in the initial stages of your literature search, you can get an overview of which bases best cover exactly your topic. At the same time, you also risk not missing relevant literature in a base that you might have chosen from if you had chosen some individual subject-specific databases from the start.
The disadvantage, on the other hand, is that your searches do not become as precise. You may risk getting very large numbers of search hits with a lot of irrelevant literature and you cannot utilize the individual bases’ special search fields and controlled subject words.
Try it out. It depends on your topic, which method is best for exactly what you are dealing with.
You can find the subject-specific databases either on the list of databases, where you can sort them by overarching subjects, or you can open the ProQuest or EBSCOhost databases and read more in-depth about what the individual databases cover (see screenshot from EBSCOhost below)
Reference articles are found in reference works, encyclopedias or handbooks and contains concise descriptions of terms, events, subject areas etc. They are shorter than research articles, because the aim is to give an introduction to the term, but they usually include a lot of useful references to other more detailed literature within the field.
You can find some of the the reference works available on our database list. The reference works on the database list are research-based which means that you can reference them in your projects as opposed to an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia, where anyone can edit the articles.
Below you can see an example of a reference article:
You can use the Royal Danish Library's Database search
At that page you can all the databases available in the Royal Danish Library sorted by name and subject area. Do note that the different Danish universities have different licenses, so it might not be every database, that is available at RUC.
We do not recommend using Google or Google Scholar to search for scientific literature. Instead, use the resources RUC provides (soeg.kb.dk and different databases)
Google and Google Scholar searches are quick and seemingly effective, but they should not be the only search systems in your literature search.
Searches with Google are influenced by algorithms and show personalized and ranked content, controlled among other things by your search history, use of social media, and geographical location.
Often, Google provides quick and personal searches, but can miss significant material and create bias in your search. In addition, much academic and peer-reviewed material is hidden behind paywalls - which you have access to via RUC’s databases.
With Infomedia, you can find more than 75 million articles dating back to around 1990. Infomedia covers all Danish nationwide newspapers, regional and local daily newspapers, local weekly newspapers, trade journals and magazines, news agencies, web media, and radio and television broadcasts.
Mediestream contains more than a million broadcasts from The Royal Library’s unique collection of Danish radio and TV, cinema advertisements, and 35 million newspaper pages. The content in Mediestream represents a wide range of radio and TV broadcasts, including background-oriented programs, society and debate, educational programs, and information and culture. The commercials in Mediestream consist partly of cinema advertisements from the period 1907-1995 and partly of TV 2 commercials from the period 1988-2005.