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INTD 19901.01 How Do You Win a Food Fight? - Kercher

What are Databases?

Online indexes of journal articles and abstracts. Many include full-text journal articles. Some databases also contain book chapters, newspaper/magazine articles, citations for books, and more.

Finding Articles

A subject-specific database can be helpful because it will only show you articles from journals in that field. 

Interdisciplinary databases may be useful if you aren't finding enough sources in a subject-specific database. 

These databases search across a variety of subjects and may be useful for many different courses.

These databases may be useful to you in other classes and give you a sampling of what the library has to offer for various subjects.

Reading the bibliographies of a good article or book can be very helpful.  But how do you find one of the sources listed?  Look up the part written in italics.


If your citation looks something like the one below, then it's an article.  (Hint:  You know it's a journal article if you see volume/issue/page #s.)

   Morrow, P. ‘‘Those Sick Challenger Jokes.’’ Journal of Popular Culture. 20.4 (1987): 175-84.

Finding it: 

   -look up the title of the journal in the OneSource Journal Finder (Note:  Look up the journal title, which is in italics, not the "article title," which is in "quotation marks.")
   -if the journal is available electronically, you can search within the journal itself or click on the "Full Text Access" link, and check if we have access to the year you need
   -if the journal is available in print, read the rest of the journal's record to see if we have the volume/issue you need
 

If your citation looks something like the one below, then it's a book.  (Hint:  You know it's a book if you see a city and a publisher/press)

   Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation; Bellin, Joshua David; 2005, Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press.

Finding it:
   -look up the title of the book in the Hiram Library Catalog
   -if we don't have it, click on the OhioLINK button to find it in another Ohio library

OneSource Search

Precision in Searching

The words "AND," "OR," and "NOT" can help you make a search more precise.

For example, the search 'films AND psychology NOT children', will return a search with results that contain the keywords 'films' and 'pyschology' but not 'children' - important if you are only looking at adolescent psychology in films.