| Library Databases | |
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Types of Resources: Magazines, books, essays, peer reviewed articles, maps, newspapers |
Types of Resources: Various media & websites from around the world |
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Organization & Quality: Organized by subject & reviewed for publication. Ability to filter results. Updated Regularly & indexed. |
Organization & Quality: Information not organized or reviewed, ‘Dead Links’, authors not necessarily verified, lots of duplicates |
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Uses: Scholarly Research |
Uses: Entertainment, current events, socializing, shopping |
Google is a great tool for learning more about your research topic!
Google uses natural language searching aka, you can ask it anything in any way (a question, random set of words) and it will bring you results. A LOT of results. Which can vary greatly in quality.
So it's a great place to find general information on a topic.
Once you've gotten a better understanding on your topic, THEN its time to head over to your library databases to find academic, scholarly research on it.
Once you've developed your research question and identified keywords and the type of resources you need its time to head to academic databases.
A library database is a digital collection of academic research, usually organized by subject mattter. Shafer library and our consortium partners pay for access to databases so you, the students and faculty, so you have access to reliable, quality academic scholarship.
Databases can include:
Using Databases on your Topic
Shafer library provides access to over 200 databases on a variety of subjects, so its easy to find one that's perfect for finding resources. While you can start with OneSearch on the library homepage, it can be beneficial using a databases with a more limited pool of resources, so you aren't searching through thousands of search results unrelated to your research question.
Our A-Z Databases page gives you several ways to sort through all the databases we provide access to
Databases offer many ways to help narrow your search results down to a manageable number using LIMITERS. You will find them on the left side of most of our databases. Here are a few of the most useful.
Full Text Limiter
Limiting your results to full text will only return results that have the entire article attached as a pdf, html, or are available immediately by some other means ( a repository, open access journal, etc.). If you don't select this, some of the results you get may just be a citation for a book/article/other resource.
Peer-Reviewed/ Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals
Oftentimes your instructor will ask for only Peer Reviewed research articles. Unlike other resources, like newspapers or blog posts that might not be written by an expert on the topic, scholarly, peer-reviewed articles are created by experts in their fields and the resource been reviewed by others for quality and importance in their field before being approved for publication. This helps academic journals provide you with cutting-edge, reliable, and verifiable research.
Publication Date
Depending on your research topic it might also be useful to limit by publication date.
Resource Type
Many databases have more than academic journal articles, so limiting by resources you need is also useful.
