Guides: Communication Sciences &amp; Disorders: Databases & Journals

PSYCHOLOGY (NEUROLOGY)

OneFile: Psychology
Provides access to authoritative periodical content supporting research in all fields of psychology— abnormal, biological, cognitive, comparative, developmental, personality, quantitative, social and all areas of applied psychology. Discover relevant information from the thoughts, views, discoveries, and reports found in this comprehensive collection.
Formerly called Psychology Collection
APA PsycARTICLES
Includes more than 200,000 full-text articles published by the American Psychological Association and affiliated journals.
APA PsycINFO
World's largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. Produced by the American Psychological Association, it includes more than 4 million bibliographic records and indexing of more than 2,500 journals.

MEDICAL/ALLIED HEALTH

Health Source - Nursing/Academic
Scholarly journals covering nursing and allied health topics including pediatric nursing, critical care, mental health, nursing management, medical law and more. Includes more than 320 full-text journals and a comprehensive medical dictionary.
Medline
Created by the United States National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE is an authoritative bibliographic database containing citations and abstracts for biomedical and health journals used by health care professionals, nurses, clinicians and researchers.
OneFile: Nursing and Allied Health
Search a subset of Gale Academic OneFile journals covering nursing and allied health, including specialized care, treatment, and patient management. Includes highlighting and note-taking tools and provides multiple pathways to key information.
Formerly called Nursing and Allied Health Collection
PubMed Central
A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine.

EDUCATION SPECIFIC DATABASES

ERIC
Articles, research reports, and digests from education-related journals and the U.S. Department of Education.
Professional Development Collection
Specialized information designed for educators, professional librarians and education researchers. Includes more than 450 full-text journals, of which nearly 300 are peer-reviewed.

MULTI-DISCIPLINARY DATABASES

Academic OneFile
Provides millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources—including thousands of podcasts and transcripts from NPR and CNN as well as videos from BBC Worldwide Learning.
Academic Search Ultimate
Academic Search Ultimate is our largest multidisciplinary database of academic journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos.
JSTOR
A collection of core scholarly journals, many going back to the first volume. Emphasis is on back issue coverage. JSTOR also has an extensive collection of primary sources.
Oxford Reference Online
Provides over 2 million digitized entries from Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias. Find facts, figures, definitions, quotations, translations, and illustrations covering 25 subject areas such as history, linguistics, medicine and health, music, and religion.
Sage Journals Online
A searchable collection of scholarly online journals published by Sage, covering humanities, natural science, education, fine arts, music, and social science

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Boston Public Library Education Resources

Getting Started

IDENTIFY KEYWORDS
The building block of a library database search is keywords. Keywords are central ideas or terms within your research question or problem.

BOOLEAN SEARCH OPERATORS
Once you have your keywords identified (2-3 is a good place to begin), you then need to connect them together in a way the database understands how to search. This is done using the Boolean search operators AND, OR, and NOT. Connecting keywords using these search operators creates a search string.

AND - narrow search, used to combine terms together and focus search results
OR - broad search, used to includes results that contain similar or like words, such as synonyms
NOT - narrow search by exclusion, used to exclude results containing a particular keyword

SEARCH STRINGS
We call the written version of your keywords with boolean search operators the search string. Writing your search string at the beginning of your research process will help you better approach searching in library databases.

Example search string
dyslexia OR reading disabilities AND decoding OR phonics AND intervention