POPS 10101: Intro to College Research Course Guide

Use a database (an online index of articles) to help you locate articles for your research paper. 

Databases can index all sorts of thinks (Netflix and Spotify are both databases!), but for our purposes today, we'll use them to find journal articles. 

Library staff provide an overview to help you get started using online resources for your research:

Why should you begin your research with the library's homepage? How do I know which database to use? Library staff provide an overview to help you get started using online resources for your research.

You can't read 100,000 or even 1,000 articles. Refine your searches to limit your results to just the articles you need!

The words "AND," "OR," and "NOT" can help you make a search more precise. This is called Boolean searching, and it can seem really intimidating, but once you get the hang of them, Boolean searches can really help you!

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.

Learn more with this guide from the MIT libraries. It really helps explain Boolean searching, and you don’t have to be a computer scientist to understand!

The following video also outlines the ways to use advanced search techniques in databases.

Once you've found one good article, check that article's sources. Learn how to make use of those sources to add to your research:

🍎 I Have the Article Citation - Now What?

A citation is like an address—it tells you where to find the article.

1. Understand the Citation:

• Journal Title: Where it was published.
• Article Title: The name of the article.
• Author(s): Who wrote it.
• Year, Volume, Issue, Pages: Details to help find it.

Example (APA):
Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(3), 5–13.
In the example above:

• The New Criterion is the title of the journal.
• The eclipse of listening is the article title.
• Scruton, R. is the author's name.

2. Find the Article:

• Search by Journal Title: Use the "Finding Journals" tool on the library website.
• Search by Article Title: Use OneSource to look up the article directly.

3. Get the Article:

• If it's available, view or download it.
• If not, request it through Interlibrary Loan.
• Save the link using a "Permalink" so you can access it later.

Need Help?
Check out the Virginia Tech Citation Tutorial for more practice!

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