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I am going to demonstrate how to find scholarly resources in two of our databases:
Academic Search Complete and ProQuest Research Library.
Many databases have a feature that allows users to limit their search results to scholarly, that is, peer-reviewed journals.
Be on the lookout for this if you have an assignment that requires peer-reviewed sources.
I am going to show you how to find scholarly resources in Academic Search Complete
Keep a couple of things in mind: Academic Search Complete is part of a larger group of databases provided by EBSCOHost.
The tips that I am going to show you will work in any database with the EBSCOHost logo on it.
Now say that I want to look for information about Pride and Prejudice and marriage because it's a topic that I'm curious about
What I will do is enter my search terms
"Pride and Prejudice"
And I'm enclosing it in quotes because I'm telling the database that I want to search for this exact phrase
And my next search term which is "marriage"
Now if you look here under your search options and under limit your results you have two different, um
ticky-boxes. You can select scholarly or peer-reviewed journals. This will narrow it down to
only academic sources
and then you have full-text as well and that tells the database that you only want to retrieve articles that are ready for you to download
so once you've done that you can click search
and you can see that I now have six results in the database
Now interpreting these results: If you look right here, you have two different
types of full text that you can get--either HTML or PDF. You may prefer one or the other. Some of them will only have PDF
and if you click on the article
you have several different options. You can print it. You can email it to yourself
or you can save. And the most useful option that students have is to cite the article.
And it gives you several different citation formats. The most common format for English classes is MLA, but your instructor may
prefer another format, such as Chicago style or possibly APA style.
Consult with your professor to see which
citation style she prefers.
Next, we'll do a search in ProQuest Research Library.
Similar to Academic Search Complete, any database that has the ProQuest logo on it will have the same search features.
Now Proquest Research Library is slightly easier than Academic Search Complete because
You already have the peer-reviewed ticky-box right here.
I always like to go under the advanced search because it offers you
more options. So again, I'm going to repeat my search that I did in Academic Search Complete by searching for Pride and Prejudice.
and searching for any article
that's about the topic of marriage
and I'll click on peer reviewed
and click on search.
Now there are 11 results for my search in here and you can kind of see how
the search terms are highlighted and it has the full text
you can also check the citation
to see what the article is about, see who wrote it, and confirm whether this is actually a scholarly resource, but since we narrowed it
down, we already know that these are scholarly resources.