Multidisciplinary library databases index hundreds of journals and provide the full-text of many articles. The producers of these aggregator databases-such as InfoTrac (Expanded Academic ASAP and Info Trac School Edition), EBSCO (MAS Ultra-School Edition and Academic Search Elite), and ProQuest (Periodical Abstracts)-pull together hundreds of journals from all fields, make them accessible with an attractive interface, and market them to libraries with the promise of providing instant entrée to the world of scholarly articles.

The educational community has enthusiastically embraced these full-text databases. The ability to retrieve complete articles through a library's Web site has imparted a new level of convenience to traditional research. But the full-text articles have become so popular that users are reluctant to confront their downsides; as a result, they jeopardize the effectiveness of their research. Therefore, educators must understand and communicate the scope and limitations of full-text databases in order to enable their students to become contentious consumers of electronic information.

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