When you are first starting out your research, you'll want to use keyword searches in an academic database, which you can think of as unknown item searching, because we don't know what we're looking for precisely - we just know what it should be about. However, keyword searches can be ineffective and frustrating. So, once you have found one or two good research articles, it will be time to transition your search strategy to searching for known items using the article bibliography and Google Scholar - we'll talk about that more in the next topic.
Instructions - go through the tabs in order to learn:
So, what is a database?
In the context of a library, a database is usually a collection of citations, abstracts, and articles provided by the library. Databases are expensive, but the subscriptions the library purchases and manages give University of Lynchburg students free access to many resources.
Ok, now that you know what a database is, you need to know where our databases live, and to use them to find peer-reviewed articles. Please Note:There are two videos in the playlist. The second video demonstrates using Academic Search Complete, however, the interface will work exactly the same for all EBSCO databases, and other academic databases will work similarly.
Watch the playlist below to learn more.
If you are interested in exploring one of our many other databases, here are a few tip sheets to get you started.
Scholarly sources live in academic databases. We saw in the earlier videos that scholarly articles can be found by using the peer-reviewed filter on the respective database.
What's important to know here is that scholarly books don't live together with scholarly articles - they tend to live alone in their own dedicated sites. Use the links below to browse our ebooks databases for scholarly books.
