Databases and Resources
Finding Journal Articles
Often your professor will ask you to use scholarly articles, academic articles, or peer-reviewed articles. These are generally all the same thing. They are written by scholars who are experts in their fields and are usually tied to a college or university. They are great for:
- Credible and trustworthy information
- Recent findings and research topics in the field
- Research studies, tables, and data
- Bibliographies and reference lists.
Find Journal Articles about your topic:
- Academic Search Premier (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
Provides searching of over 8,500 journals, including peer-reviewed, across a wide range of topics. coverage: 1975 to present - Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new windowProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global (PQDT Global) is the world's most comprehensive collection of full-text dissertations and theses. Find cutting edge topics, lists of relevant references, and investigate ways researchers frame their topic.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A full-text collection of more than 400 journals in business and the liberal arts, with especially strong coverage of business, finance, economics, history, regional studies, education, and sociology. - PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
PsycARTICLES searches "over 50 top full-text psychology publications covering the disciplines of Human Physiology, Personality Psychology, Social Psychology, Educational Psychology, and more." PsycINFO provides access to abstracts only of international literature in psychology and related disciplines. - Taylor & Francis Social Science & Humanities Library This link opens in a new windowOver 1,400 journals featuring key research across 14 Social Sciences and Humanities subject areas. Includes a large number of important journals in the field of psychology.
- Alt HealthWatch (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowProvides access to over 180 publications, including peer-reviewed journals, on complementary, holistic, and integrated approaches to health and wellness.
- Business Source Complete (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
Leading scholarly business database with over 1,300 publications, including peer-reviewed journals. Covers all business disciplines, including marketing, management, accounting, finance, and economics. Also includes financial data, company profiles, industry reports, market research reports, SWOT analyses, and more.
- Coronavirus Research Database This link opens in a new windowIncluding coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak, this database curates openly available content related to coronaviruses. It includes thousands of open-access articles from the world’s leading publishers as well as current research from pre-print repositories such as arXiv and will continue to grow and evolve as more is learned about the pandemic.
- Health Source (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowContains 550 scholarly full-text journals with a focus on many medical disciplines, as well as 80 full-text publications on consumer health and 130 health reference books.
- National Institutes of HealthThe National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the nation’s medical research agency — making important discoveries that improve health and save lives.
Statistics & Online Resources
Are you researching a specific age group or locale? Find out more about the people by using statistical resources like the ones below.
- Statista This link opens in a new window
One of the world's largest statistics portals with data from over 18,000 sources. Provides access to 1 million statistics. Also contains information on industries, countries, digital markets, and other topics, as well as infographics.
- U.S. Census BureauThis resource provides a wealth of demographic information about people, geography, and businesses. Enter a state, city, county, or zip code into the Community Facts box at the top of the page and then take a look at some of the options in the left-hand column to find out about a community's population, age, education, income, and other data.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsThe Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor is the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy.
Finding Books and Ebooks
Bowman Library has a large variety of books and ebooks that are chosen for their relevance to the courses offered. You can access ebooks directly from the library website whether your off or on campus. Books and ebooks are good for finding overviews and history of your topic. You don't need to read the whole book to get the information you need for your project; often one chapter of a scholarly book will cover the information you need.
Search the Bowman Library Catalog
Tips for searching:
- Remember to break your research question down into concepts
Example: "Is meditation an effective therapeutic tool for college students with generalized anxiety disorder?"
Concepts: "Meditation" "Therapy OR Therapeutic" "College students" "Anxiety"
3. You may need to narrow or broaden your search terms if you are getting too many or too few results with a search.
4. If you hit a dead end, that is a normal part of searching. Try changing up your search terms, checking to see if you are using common terminology, or ask for help from the library. We are here to help you search.
Finding the Right Search Terms:
Remember that not every author will use the same terms, even if the ideas are similar. Use all the tools available to you to help you find synonyms or professional or discipline-specific terms to search for your topic. Here are some examples:
1. For topics on DIVERSITY - try "Cross-cultural", "Cultural", "Ethnology" or "transcultural"
2. For topics on a specific population, try synonyms for that population. Example: Child, children, teens, adolescents, high school students, youth
3. For topics that may have subtopics try both the larger category and the subcategory. For example, if you are researching sports injuries and mental health, try both "Sports" and "baseball" or whichever sport you might be interested in.
Another example of this is figuring out which branch of psychology your topic might fit into. When you are using search terms, try both "psychology" AND "developmental psychology". You will get a larger number of results with a broader topic. So switch back and forth between a narrower term and a broader term if you are finding too few or too many results.
4. Try variations on phrases. Example: Sex, sexual behavior, sexual health, sexual response, sexual disorders. Once you begin to see articles that you are interested in, you will learn which variants of a phrase are the most successful for the particular search you are doing.
USE THE TOOLS IN THE DATABASES
Remember to use the autocomplete in an individual database. This autocomplete is telling you what search terms or phrases are used in the database and will have real articles attached to them. The autocomplete is also a good source of synonyms and professional terms as well.
Also use the Subject tags, Keyword tags, and the abstract attached to a journal article to help you quickly skip to other articles related to the one you found.
How to search a specific site in Google
SITE Searching
One way to target results in Google is to employ the site search. This requires you use a specific phrase before adding search terms to tell Google you only want results from a specific website or domain. The search always begins with site + colon + URL or Domain all without any spaces; next, add a space and insert your search terms. See the examples below -
- site:nytimes.com food sports performance This search phrase tells Google that you'd like results from the New York Times website that mention food, sports, and performance. **Using a site search is one of the best ways to search for articles on a given topic in the New York Times**
- site:gov food AND 'climate change' This search phrase tells Google you'd like to see articles, reports, etc., from government websites concerned with food and climate change. Because we want Google to search climate change as a phrase, it's important to put the two words in quotes. [This search is limited to the period 2017-2022]
- site:gov food nutrition 'mental health' Another example of a search in government websites for the connection between food and mental health. Notice that we put mental health in quotes to search it as a phrase.
- site:edu food sustainability environment This search phrase tells Google to retrieve articles published by or in educational institutions using the key terms food sustainability and environment. [The result set has been limited to the date range 2017-2022]