What is a Document?

Your search leads you to documents, which are, simply put, individual texts, with or without graphics, that contain information. Depending on the Gale collection you are currently searching, documents may be reference essays, magazine and journal articles, newspaper columns, pages from an eBook, primary sources such as letters and diary entries, and/or literary works such as poems and plays. Look for the full-text icon on your results list (), which indicates that you'll be able to read the essay, article or work 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 provides only publication information (no actual text of the article or work) and is indicated by the citation icon on the results list (). An abstract includes the citation along with a summary of the article or work and is designated by the abstract icon ().

Lastly, the general term docment is also used to mean some type of multimedia file, if available in the Gale collection you are using.

All documents can be viewed on the document display page.