Why use a database?
For off-campus access you will need to login using your StarID and password. The screen looks like this:
What does the Full Text Filter do?
Selecting the Full Text filter ensures that all results have full text available to read immediately (this can be either HTML Full Text or a PDF).
What if you don't select "Full Text"?
If Full Text is not selected, there will be many more search results, but many of these will be abstracts that describe the material but the material itself will either be inaccessible or requestable through Interlibrary Loan.
What does it mean to Request an Article via Interlibrary Loan?
Requesting articles or e-books via Interlibrary Loan is a free service to all students, faculty and staff at M State. These requests are sent to other Minnesota State College and University Libraries to be processed by their library staff. Once the articles are located, they are sent via email to the email address associated with the patron's email account (typically their HCC email). These requests can take a day or two to process, so while this is a useful function that can provide students with access to articles that best fit their research needs, it is an option that should only be used when students have time to wait for an article to be processed and emailed.
What does Peer Reviewed mean?
"Peer Reviewed" essentially means that an article was written by a subject expert and reviewed by other experts in the field to ensure accuracy.
Why select the Scholarly/Peer Reviewed Filter?
Instructors often require that students use Scholarly/Peer Reviewed journal articles as sources in their essays. They do this to impress upon students the importance of using reliable, authoritative sources in their research. This filter removes much of the need for source evaluation (at least as far as reliability, accuracy, and authority are concerned), which can still be required within databases that include results from popular magazines, blogs, and book reviews.
What is a Publication Date?
A Publication Date is the date that an article or other work is published. This is slightly different from an item's copyright date, which is the date that a work is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or first manifests physically.
Why use the Publication Date Filter?
Using the Publication Date filter ensures that only information published within a specific date range will appear in your search results. This is especially useful when conducting research in the science and health-care fields, which often require that sources used be published within the last five years. To use this filter, select the "From" Month and Year and "To" Month and Year to establish the date range for your search results.
Start broad and work your way to a more specific topic.
After you conduct your first page spend time looking at the results that came back, even if you don't think it looks promising! Pay attention to the subjects that are listed and start to build your list of search terms.
Don't choose a source based on title alone - Article titles can be misleading; read the description or abstract of a source before deciding to use it. Article Abstracts are brief summaries of the article. These can be useful for gauging whether an article applies to your research or not. Keep in mind that the Abstract should not be quoted or used as a source in your assignment- only the article should be.
Conduct multiple searches - If at first you don't succeed, try again! Odds are you won't get it right the first time.
Vary your search terms - Sometimes something as simple as changing a word in your search can get you the perfect results. This is why we spend time at the beginning of the search looking around and building our search term list.
Use Quotations for Phrases
Quotation Marks (" ") should be used before and after a phrase, (two or more words) that must appear together in a specific order. This lets the database know that you want to search for this phrase, and not the individual words that make up the phrase.
Examples:
In each of these examples using the quotation marks signals that the database should look for the phrase rather than each individual word in the phrase. This means that the database will look for the words "eating disorder" together in that order, rather than simply looking for the word "eating" and the word "disorder" separately.
Search Operators (called Boolean Operators) allow you to fine-tune your search by using the operators AND, OR, and NOT to combine search terms to broaden or narrow your search. You should always type these operators in capital letters.
Truncation is used to search for the same term with different word-endings. This is another way of making your search broader, with more results.
The truncation symbol is usually the asterisk (*).
Examples:
| If you search for: | You will get: |
|---|---|
| librar* | librarian, libraries, etc. |
| nurs* | nursing, nurses, nurse, nursery, etc. |
| diet* | diet, diets, dietician, etc. |