Step 2: Find information about your topic
- Head for the library and meet with your Liaison Librarian to review resources, such as databases. What are databases?
- Online, organized collections where you can find electronic versions of newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, ebooks, data, statistics, business reports, and streaming video
- UVAWise Library subscribes to numerous databases
- Wide range of subject areas.
- Use email or share tools to send an article to yourself
- Use citation tools to copy/paste your citation at the end of a paper
- Sometimes a database citation will mess up the capitalization
- Be sure to make the corrections before submitting your assignment
- Also double-check the italics in the source title and database name. Fix it if not.
- Available 24/7. Login accessible off-campus
- Link to UVAWise Library's complete A-Z Databases list.
- Link to UVAWise Library Database Tutorial Videos to learn more about working with library databases.
It is helpful to do some initial searching in library databases, in particular Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) or Google Scholar, when you're brainstorming, to see what is out there--are there many articles on your topic idea or just a few? How hard will it be to thoroughly research and write about this topic?
Whether you're using a library database or Google, taking advantage of certain search strategies will produce quicker, more relavant results.
- To make sure you are searching a group of words, put quotation marks around a phrase
- An asterisk (*), or truncator, at the end of a word will search for everything that begins with that group of letters in most databases, ex: comput* will return all words starting with four letters; computing, computer, compute, etc.
- You can also try a question mark (?) within a word to include multiple spellings. For example wom?n will find both woman and women.
- Focus your search by using Boolean operators; AND, OR, AND NOT
- Some databases allow you to perform proximity searches, for example the following phrase, movies w/3 drugs is searching for instances when the term movies is within 3 words of the term drugs.
- Consider using synonyms for words, e.g. society = culture, community, civilization, etc.
- Broaden your search. If you don't find an article on your topic don't assume it hasn't been written. You might just be using the wrong terms or might be searching too specifically to find it. Try broader terms.
- Look carefully at the results from your search. If there is a great article, look at the subject headings.
