Essay Writing

Databases keep track of articles that have been published. These are wonderful, actually, because they give you access to reliable information that is easy to sort through. Basically, all you have to do is type in a keyword, and it brings you many (sometimes hundreds) of places to look for information related to your topic. You can access a database (or many) through your school library or a local library. Here are some tips for using databases to find journal articles that you might want.

1. Select “full-text” when you’re searching for an article. Databases do not always have text copies of the articles they list. Unless you want to request the article from your library (this usually takes a week or two), click the “full-text” option. If you click this, it will only bring back articles that it has access to. However, requesting a journal article through your library isn’t hard, and some information you may need may not be found if you only use the full-text method. It is usually free to request these, and I have never gotten one that I needed to pay for.

2. Mix up your keywords. Whatever your topic is, try to think of different ways to name it. If you are writing about vitamins, try searching for “nutrition” or “nutrients” or “supplements” in addition to “vitamins.”

3. Drop the “s,” instead of “vitamins” type in “vitamin,” because sometimes the search engine won’t recognize them as being the same.

4. If you are stuck trying to think of different words to search for, try typing your topic word into an online thesaurus and seeing some of the synonyms that come up. This has worked for me several times.

5. Narrow or expand your keywords. With the vitamins example, you could search for “Centrum,” “thiamine supplements,” “healthy eating,” or “vegetables.” The best thing about databases is you can search for all of these in a matter of minutes, so you can run several searches until you find one that brings results.

6. Use different databases, if possible. Different databases have access to different journals, and so if you don’t find what you’re looking for in one, you can try another.