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We know you love Google, but sometimes it's not the best way to get the right resources for your academic paper.
So here's the difference between searching Google, EBSCO, and the individual academic databases available from the library.
For the purposes of this analogy, let’s say that we’re looking for soup
Quality soup. Scholarly soup. Peer-reviewed soup.
Often your professors say they want 3-8 cans of soup for each paper.
The problem with Google is that it’s really big, and also it doesn’t specialize in soup.
It’s kind of like going to a giant mall like Destiny USA
and starting on one end and going through to the other.
You might find some things related to soup, or about soup, or even celebrating soup,
but it’s going to take you a while to find actual soup.
And sometimes those sources can be great, but,
and this is the most important thing, they are not what your professor asked for. And since your prof grades your paper . . . .
There are some tricks to narrow Google down though.
One of our favorites is the “site:” operator.
This restricts the search engine to one site or suffix.
This is particularly useful for finding government statistics.
Basically, it ensures you’re looking for t-shirts in the clothing store.
EBSCO, on the other hand is a group of academic databases.
It’s like you went to a nice grocery store.
The advantage is that it’s full of food, including soup and things you can make soup out of.
Not everything is soup, but there are a lot fewer t- shirts and movies.
Now, you can search all of the EBSCO databases at once,
but if you’d really like to narrow things down, you can go straight to the databases themselves.
The nice thing about doing this is that you know everything in that database is related to your field.
So ERIC, is all Education stuff (in this case it’s the pasta aisle).
The individual databases also have subject terms (or a thesaurus) that can help you find what you’re looking for.
It's the words you use to search that database.
Now I know, you’re thinking “This is still not soup.”
Well, pasta can greatly enhance soup.
However since we were looking for Psychology soup, that’s over in PsycINFO. And as you can see, it’s all soup.
Now, some things (book reviews, etc) might not be the best soup for your paper,
but most of what’s there is exactly the sort of source your professor wants you to use!
Just think, if you’d started here, you would have been done by now!
We hope this has been helpful, and don’t forget, you can always Ask a Librarian!