What is a Document?
Your search leads you to documents, which are, simply put, individual texts containing information. Depending on the Gale database(s) you are currently searching, documents may be magazine and journal articles, newspaper columns, reference essays, and/or pages from an eBook. Look for the full-text icon on your results list (
), which indicates that you'll be able to read the article or essay in its entirety. The full-text with image icon (
) means that along with the full text, you'll also find at least one image.
Documents may also be brief references to other documents where the full-text version is not included in this Gale collection. For example, you may find citations and abstracts. A citation is a reference to an article or work that contains publication information and is indicated by the citation icon on the results list (
). An abstract includes the citation along with a summary of the article. The abstract icon (
) signals the presence of an abstract.
Lastly, a docment may also be some type of multimedia file, which may include image and audio files, as well as pages containing links to external websites.
The specific type of documents you'll find depends on the database(s) you have selected to search. You'll see the document type at the far right for each item on the results list.
All documents can be viewed on the document display page.