Library article collections
There is a wealth of periodicals and articles in the library's subscription databases. The most important such databases in your field of study are the ones listed below. For information on how to access these databases from off-campus, you may consult our off-campus access page. To find out tips about how to make successful searches when using library databases, you may click the button below.
Searching library databases is a bit different from searching Google. Sometimes entering relevant keywords in a database search box will not lead you to the most relevant results. At other times, you may end up retrieving too many or too few results.
When faced with such issues, using one or more of the searching techniques provided below may prove to be helpful.
- Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, NOT, allow you to combine keywords and either broaden or narrow down your results.
- Truncation broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings (e.g., comput* will retrieve results, which include words with this root).
- Phrase searching (i.e., using parentheses or quotation marks around strings of search words) allows you to search for adjacent words as phrases.
- Field searching allows you to limit your results based on specific database fields, such as author, title, publication, date, subject, etc.
Keep in mind that different databases may recognize different Boolean operators, truncation and/or phrase searching symbols, as well as include different search fields. To find out what works in each database, make sure you consult the specific database's help section.
Apart from the above searching techniques, you may also try some of the following.
If you wish to limit down your results, try using:
- more specific/precise search terms.
- more search terms.
- database filters.
- database controlled vocabulary/thesaurus, if available.
If you wish to broaden up your search results, try using:
- more general/broader search terms.
- synonym search terms.
- other databases.
For more information on how to effectively search library databases, you may consult our "Constructing searches" guide.
► Multi-disciplinary collections