Abibliographic database is adatabase ofbibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works likejournal andnewspaper articles, conferenceproceedings, reports, government and legal publications,patents andbooks. In contrast tolibrary catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than completemonographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form ofkeywords, subject classification terms, orabstracts.[1]
A bibliographic database may cover a wide range of topics or oneacademic field likecomputer science.[2] A significant number of bibliographic databases are marketed under a trade name by licensing agreement from vendors, or directly from their makers: theindexing and abstracting services.[3]
Many bibliographic databases have evolved intodigital libraries, providing the full text of the organised contents:[citation needed]for instanceCORE also organises and mirrors scholarly articles andOurResearch develops a search engine foropen access content inUnpaywall.[4] Others merge with non-bibliographic and scholarly databases to create more complete disciplinarysearch engine systems, such asChemical Abstracts orEntrez.
Prior to the mid-20th century, individuals searching for published literature had to rely on printedbibliographic indexes, generated manually fromindex cards.
During the early 1960s computers were used to digitize text for the first time; the purpose was to reduce the cost and time required to publish two American abstracting journals, theIndex Medicus of theNational Library of Medicine and theScientific and Technical Aerospace Reports of theNational Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By the late 1960s, such bodies of digitized alphanumeric information, known as bibliographic and numeric databases, constituted a new type of information resource.[5] Online interactive retrieval became commercially viable in the early 1970s over private telecommunications networks. The first services offered a few databases of indexes and abstracts of scholarly literature. These databases contained bibliographic descriptions of journal articles that were searchable by keywords in author and title, and sometimes by journal name or subject heading. The user interfaces were crude, the access was expensive, and searching was done by librarians on behalf of "end users".[6]
