Overview
Expert searching:
- Connect terms and phrases.
Example: technology AND politics - Place quotation marks around phrases.
Example: technology AND "public policy" (placing quotation marks around the phrase, "public policy") - Broaden your search by using OR between alternate terms. Place these terms in parentheses.
Example: Technology AND (policy OR politics) - Truncate terms with an asterisk * to find variant endings.
Example: technolog* (finds technology and technological)
Research is iterative
Start with some of the key words and phrases of your research question.
Read through some of the articles you find, looking for additional ideas and key words that can be used to search again. Are there specific issues to pursue further? Different key words or concepts you might search?
Note: Some database records will also provide subject heading or descriptor terms to help narrow or broaden your search. Keep an eye out for these! They can also be extremely useful.
Selected Databases
- Academic Search PremierThis multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 8,500 journals, including full text for more than 4,600 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
- Engineering Village 2Journal articles and conference proceedings covering engineering. Includes many links to full-text articles.
- History of Science, Technology and MedicineProvides references to articles, books, and book chapters, on medical, scientific, and cultural/social histories of disease.
- PAIS InternationalInternational coverage of public policy literature in economics, government, law, international business, political science and public administration.
- ScienceDirectFull-text articles on a wide variety of science topics.
- Web of ScienceWeb of Science indexes scientific journal articles. It is also a citation database that allows cited- reference searching to determine articles that have cited a particular article or author.