When you need to find a comprehensive set of articles on your topic, the most efficient finding tool to use is an article index. In the context of scholarly research, an index is an article finding tool, rather than a list of topics and page numbers in the back of a book.
Article indexes (sometimes referred to as databases) help you identify and find articles on your topic. An article index allows you to search for your topic in hundreds of journals at once, so using an index is a huge time saver when you don’t have one specific journal in mind. Some indexes also cover magazines, newspapers, book chapters, conference presentations, dissertations, or other materials.
