The Library subscribes to many different databases (eg. e-books, newspapers, standards etc) but the primary sources of information for scientific research are the journal article databases.
The publications indexed in the journal article databases are mainly from scholarly (academic) and professional publishers, so the information is reliable and often of high quality.
Many databases specialize in a particular subject area, so it is important to select those that are the most appropriate for your topic. Check the Library Subject Guide for your discipline. Databases can also be accessed via the Library’s Databases page. Depending on the scope of your research, you may also find that you have to search databases across several subject areas.
Some databases include all results in full text, others provide some full text and others - particularly specialized databases for high level research - include no full text. A database that does not include full text will still have links to full text from another database if we subscribe to it. Look out for Find It, Full Text Options etc.
All of this content can be accessed from both on and off campus. As most databases are available by subscription only, when off campus you will need to log in first with your RMIT user name and password.
Google Scholar searches a range of scholarly literature, including journal articles, conference papers, theses and technical reports. Subject coverage is predominantly within the sciences, medicine and engineering. It is possible to combine a Google Scholar search with access to the full text of a range of RMIT-subscribed e-journals by logging in as an RMIT user via the Library link to Google Scholar. This link is also available via the Library home page. Google Scholar can be a useful place to start, particularly for research that cuts across disciplines. It can also be useful for picking up brief mention within an article to a very new area of research because Google Scholar is searching the full text of articles.
However researchers should not rely only on Google Scholar because relevant material is not readily identified. A search that retrieves a manageable set of highly relevant results in a subscription database can retrieve several thousand results in Google Scholar. This is because Google Scholar does not support standard Boolean search statements and it lacks the indexing search options (ie. assigned official keywords) and post-search limiting options available in subscription databases. For this reason Google Scholar should not be considered an alternative to our subscribed journal article databases.
For more information on searching limitations in Google Scholar see:
6 common misconceptions when doing advanced Google Searching