Academic OneFile is a premier source for peer-reviewed, full-text articles for academic libraries from the world's leading journals, this comprehensive resource covers the physical and social sciences, technology, medicine, engineering, the arts, technology, literature, and many other subjects.
HeinOnline Academic includes more than 100 million pages of multidisciplinary content in more than 100 subject areas, including history, political science, criminal justice, religious studies, international relations, women’s studies, pre-law, and many more. With more historical content than any other database, HeinOnline provides access to 300+ years of information on political development and the complete history of the creation of government and legal systems around the world.
Academic Search Complete offers an enormous collection of full-text journals, providing users access to critical information from many sources unique to this database. In addition, it includes peer-reviewed full text for STEM research, as well as for the social sciences and humanities. Scholarly content covers a broad range of important areas of academic study, including anthropology, engineering, law, sciences and more.
JSTOR is collection of core scholarly journals, many going back to the first volume. Emphasis is on back issue coverage and does not include the current 3-5 years, unless Gordon has a current subscription to the journal. JSTOR provides long term preservation for journals.
WHAT CAN I FIND IN A LIBRARY DATABASE?
Library databases are best used for searching for peer-reviewed journal articles. A great database to begin searching is Academic Search Complete.
KEYWORDS
The building block of a library database search is keywords. Keywords are central ideas or terms within your research question or problem. For example, if we were exploring the topic: what are the effects of noise pollution from boating or shipping on marine mammals?, we might extract the following keywords: prime numbers AND probability.
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. For example: prime numbers AND probability.
ENTER KEYWORDS IN DATABASE SEARCH BOXES
Enter each keyword onto its own search line. If you have an OR string, include the entire string in one search box.
SEARCH LIMITERS
Below the search boxes are limiters that can be set to help filter and narrow your results. To search for scholarly articles, remember to check the scholarly (peer-reviewed) checkbox. Other useful limiter options are the date range. Since you are analyzing contemporary topics, you might consider limiting the date range boxes to the last 5 or 10 years.
USING SEARCH RESULTS
Do not limit your search to just one database. Instead look at a variety of databases both subject specific and interdisciplinary to make sure you are viewing the full scope of literature published on your topic.