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First Year Research Guide

Welcome to First Year Research! In this guide, you will find online and library resources that will help you improve your research skills and assist you in every step of the research process. Navigating this guide is all up to you, but if you get stuck,

Finding Articles Introduction

Now, we'll use those keywords to find articles related to your research question. This page will take about 10-15 minutes. The video and text content cover the same information. 

Finding Articles Text

Finding Articles Video

Welcome to Finding Articles

What to know: Articles are published in journals. Journal contents (articles) are curated and stored in searchable databases. Google Scholar is not a database. Databases do not search like Google.

What you’ll learn: How to build a search and use database tools to search library databases for journal, magazine, or newspaper articles. We'll show you in one database, but most databases work the same way.​  You'll also learn a few tricks for using Google Scholar strategically.

Why you should care: Databases do not use natural language searching like Google does - they will only do what you tell them to do.  If your search is well-formed and you use your tools wisely, your search results will be much more useful and relevant!​