Academic Search Complete provides full-text access to over 5,000 journals and magazines, including many peer-reviewed articles, plus numerous Associated Press videos covering a wide range of academic disciplines.
BioMed Central provides access to peer-reviewed open access journals in science, technology, and medicine.
BioOne Complete provides access to journals and eBooks in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences from leading society publishers.
Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) provides the top nursing and allied health literature available including nursing journals and publications from the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses Association.
ClinicalTrials.gov provides detailed information on nearly 400,000 clinical research studies worldwide as well as study details and results for the public, researchers, and healthcare professionals. Note that the U.S. government does not review or approve the safety or validity of listed studies.
Consumer Health Complete provides a wide range of consumer-oriented health information, covering mainstream medicine as well as complementary, holistic, and integrative approaches to health and wellness.
CREDO Reference provides access to a collection of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and reference works covering numerous subjects such as art, history, literature, music, religion, and science.
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books is a database providing access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books, helping users find and explore a diverse range of academic resources from reputable publishers.
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals provides access to high-quality, peer-reviewed open access journals across various disciplines.
EBSCO Discovery Service provides a single search interface to explore a wide range of research databases, including full-text journal articles, eBooks, and videos.
Free Medical Journals is an open-access database that provides access to a wide array of peer-reviewed medical journals.
Kanopy provides access over 30,000 films, including independent and documentary titles that address important social and cultural issues. Featuring renowned collections such as The Criterion Collection and The Great Courses, Kanopy is an invaluable resource for your studies and research.
MedPix is an open-access database from the National Library of Medicine with over 12,000 patient case scenarios, 9,000 clinical topics, and over 59,000 medical images, supporting medical education and research.
NewsBank provides full-text access to over 8,000 news publications, including major national and international newspapers as well as local and regional sources for a broad perspective on global and local news.
PubMed provides access to more than 37 million citations from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books, offering comprehensive coverage of biomedical literature with many citations linking to full-text content through PubMed Central and publisher websites.
Science.gov is a search platform that explores over 60 databases and 2,200 scientific websites, providing access to over 200 million pages of federal science information, including research findings and development results.
SIRS Issues Researcher provides in-depth analysis of key social issues with diverse viewpoints from more than 2,000 global sources, offering comprehensive coverage of current debates and research.
Use Keywords
Keywords are descriptive words or important concepts. Search using just keywords rather than full sentences.
Omit words like "the", "a", "are", "it" from the search. Most databases do not search for these words and they can impact the search results.
Identify keywords from your background research.
Brainstorm synonyms for keywords and search all possible concepts.
Look up your keywords in the database Subject Headings or Thesaurus section to determine if you are using the correct phrase or spelling.
Improve Search Results by Connecting Keywords
Use AND to retrieve results with both concepts (mouse AND rat)
Use OR to retrieve either keyword (mouse OR rat)
Use NOT to omit a keyword (mouse NOT rat)
Put quotation marks around phrases to retrieve results with the exact phrase ("mouse and rat")
The asterisk (*) wildcard, also known as the truncation wildcard, is generally used to find word endings. (Metaboli* will find results with metabolism, metabolic, metabolite, metabolites, metabolizing, and metabolically)
Focus Results with Limiters
Full Text will limit results to articles with full text.
Peer Reviewed limits results to articles from peer-reviewed journals.
Scholarly Journals limits results to articles from academic publishers of both "peer-reviewed" and not "peer-reviewed" journals intended for an academic audience.
Date Published can be used to limit results to a specified date range.
There are different types of sources available in library databases. In college, students are often required to use only scholarly sources. What is a scholarly source? Let's look at the differences between scholarly and popular sources to help you identify scholarly sources.
Popular Sources
Popular sources are...
Written for the general public
If they cover research studies, they will broadly summarize studies that appeared in a scholarly journal
Articles are shorter than those in scholarly journals and cover a wide range of topics
Contain many photographs and advertisements
Articles are usually written by journalists
Magazines, newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and television news programs are all examples of popular sources.
Examples include magazines like Philadelphia Magazine or newspapers like The New York Times
Scholarly Sources
Scholarly sources are...
written by scholars and researchers
written for a scholarly audience
Articles are longer than articles found in popular magazines
Articles go into depth on a very specific topic
Articles report on research studies or experiments
Articles are intended to break new ground or fill gaps in human knowledge
Articles may contain case studies or literature reviews
Usually contain few or no advertisements
Examples include Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of Pediatric Nursing, and Nature
Sources are always cited and lists of references are always included
Often go through a peer review process where the articles are read and critiqued by other experts in the same field
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