Abstract:  a brief summary; also used to refer to a type of periodical index that includes abstracts of articles. 

Bibliography:  a list of references or works cited, usually given at the end of a scholarly article, book chapter or other research material. 

Boolean Operators:   the words AND, OR, and NOT, which are used to combine search terms to either narrow or broaden a search set; named after the 19th century mathematician George Boole.

Browser:   software used to access Internet resources; Microsoft Internet Explorer is an example of a Web browser. 

Call Number:  an alphanumeric number assigned to individual library materials; call numbers provide a way to group materials on the shelf by subject; our call numbers are assigned from the Library of Congress Classification system. 

CINAHL:   Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature; it is the primary index to the literature of nursing and allied health. 

Citation:  the information necessary to find a specific article, book, etc; usually includes author, title, journal title with volume, issue & page number for articles or publisher, place of publication and year for books. 

Database:  an electronic collection of information, usually in the form of individual records broken down into specific fields. CINAHL is a database of materials about nursing, equivalent to the print index of the same name. ODU Library's online catalog is a database of all the materials owned by the library. 

Descriptor:  a subject heading; the name used for subject headings in various databases, including CINAHL. 

Fields:  the individual parts of a record in a database; examples of fields are author, title, abstract, year. 

Full Text (or Full-text):  the full content of an article; the article itself. Depending on the format(s) in which it can be viewed, saved, or printed, it may or may not include such non-text features as photographs, diagrams, graphs and charts. 

Holdings:  Materials owned by a library, including books, journals, videos, etc.

Home Page:  the initial page of a Web site; ODU Library's home page is at http://www.lib.odu.edu which leads to hundreds of pages on the library's Web server. 

Imprint:  the publisher, place of publication, and copyright date of a book. 

Index:  a print or electronic compilation of citations, usually arranged by subject and/or author, used to identify materials relevant to your literature search. An advantage of electronic indexes, or databases, is that they can be searched using keywords.  

Interlibrary Loan:  a service that allows you to borrow materials from another library 

Internet:  a widespread, worldwide network of educational, commercial, organizational and other networks 

Journal: a scholarly or professional periodical containing articles that report on research or experimentation. Generally, the articles are reviewed prior to publication by other scholars in the same field of work as the author. (For this reason they may be called "refereed publications.") Journals are intended to be read by persons in a specific field of study, and therefore contain more technical language than the popular periodicals such as magazines and newspapers.

Keyword:  a way to search for the occurrence of a word or phrase in any one of several fields in a database. Keyword searching involves using your own words, as opposed to choosing subject headings that you select from a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus.

Link:  hypertext connection on the Internet, where you click on a highlighted word or words to be connected to another place either in the current page or anywhere on the Internet. 

Magazine: a periodical intended for the general public.

Online (library) Catalog:  an electronic listing of all materials owned by a library, searchable by author, title, keyword, subject, or call number. 

Peer Review:  the process in which research articles are reviewed and critiqued by experts in that field before publication. 

Periodical Database or Index:  see Index. 

Periodical:  material that is published or issued on a continual basis throughout the year, including journals, magazines, and newspapers. Periodicals may be issued daily or weekly (newspapers); monthly (most magazines and some journals); quarterly (some journals); or annually.  

Primary Source:  the original research report written by the person who performed the research. 

Record:  an entry in a database that gives all information (in the form of fields) about a specific item such as a journal article or a book.. 

Refereed Journal:  journal that uses the peer review process for publication of articles 

References or Reference List:  a bibliography; a list of citations to materials that were consulted during a research project and mentioned in the text of the research report, journal article, etc.

Reload or Refresh:  the button on your browser that reloads the current page to be sure it is the most up-to-date revision of that page. 

Search System:  a Web interface or platform developed by a vendor with various features for searching a database. For example, Medline is a database created by the National Library of Medicine. That database is available, or "hosted," on several different search systems including FirstSearch and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.

Secondary Source:  second-hand report or review of original research that is written by someone other than the original researcher. 

Subject Heading:  a standardized term, taken from a controlled vocabulary (thesaurus) and assigned to the Subject Heading field of the record about a book, journal article, etc. Subject headings are called descriptors in some databases.

Tertiary Source:  reference material that synthesizes work already reported in primary or secondary sources. 

Thesaurus:   controlled vocabulary; list of standardized subject terms associated with a particular database or index. 

Title search: in a library catalog, you can do a title search for the title of a book, government publication, video, or periodical to find out if the library owns the item. In an online periodicals index, or database, you can do a title search for the title of an individual article in a journal or other periodical.

Truncation:  a search technique that allows a symbol to substitute for any number of characters at the end of a word root (e.g., comput* = computer, computers, computerization, etc.). 

WorldCat:  database on the FirstSearch system made up of over 35 million records of all types of materials (books, journals, videos, cassette tapes, etc); the records represent the holdings of libraries throughout the world.