GOVT 1101 (Fall 2025): Power and Politics: American Political Behavior and Public Opinion: Databases

Databases process keywords, not sentences.

Instead of relying on an algorithm to interpret your question, databases look for your keywords in the title, summary (abstract), and subject headings or indexing terms. Some databases will also look for your keywords in the full text of the article. 

Keyword searching takes some practice, but the results are often worth it!

"Natural language" search:

Do exit polls influence voter turnout? 

Keyword Search: 

"exit polls" and "voter turnout"

Search tips:

• Start broad, connecting just a few keywords or phrases with AND, e.g. polls AND elections
• Place quotation marks around phrases, e.g. "public opinion polls"
• If you receive a large number of results, add keywords to narrow your search, e.g. "exit polls" AND elections AND turnout
• Broaden your search with alternative terms, in parentheses using OR (poll OR survey)
• Use an asterisk on word stems to find variant ending, e.g. democra* finds democracy, democratic, etc. Only use fairly long word stems. Short ones will pull up too many non-relevant terms. 

The library subscribes to a large number of article databases from a variety of vendors (EBSCO, Proquest, Clarivate, and more). See the databases below.

The Articles and Full Text search from the library homepage searches across a collection of EBSCO databases. 

• Select Articles & Full Text from the library homepage
• Enter your keywords and phrases
• Use the filters to narrow your search by date published, language, etc.

Start broad, with just one or two keywords or phrases. If you retrieve a large number of results, you can add search terms to narrow your results.