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:
Some databases are good for general searching because they cover a wide range of topics from business to history. Start your research with these databases and practice using them. You can then move on to subject-specific databases in future courses!
A great starting point for research in many subjects. Includes thousands of full-text articles from both scholarly journals and popular magazines in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Watch Tutorials ▶️
Search and read full-text articles from nearly 1,000 scholarly journals. JSTOR has older journal issues going back to the very first but usually doesn’t include the most recent 3 to 5 years. It covers lots of subjects across many fields. Watch Tutorials ▶️
Get in-depth, expert-written overviews of major topics in fields like History, Political Science, Literature, Psychology, and more. Each article is reviewed by scholars and regularly updated to reflect current research. Great for background reading, building your understanding of key concepts, and finding credible sources for your papers.
You can't read 100,000 or even 1,000 articles. Refine your searches to limit your results to just the articles you need!
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:
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.
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.