A database is a searchable, electronic collection of published materials. They may include articles from encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals, as well as access to streaming video and images. Some databases also provide access to ebooks.
Most of the material found in a database cannot be accessed through a simple web search. Libraries subscribe to these databases so that students have access to reliable material that wouldn't be available elsewhere.
A complete list of available databases collections is available through our A-Z Database List.
EBSCO and ProQuest have articles from newspapers, magazines, trade publications and scholarly, peer reviewed journals. They also offer access to ebooks and streaming video.
Ebook Central provides access to ebooks and can also be searched through ProQuest.
Kanopy provides access to documentaries and feature films, including foreign and critically acclaimed films.
Credo Reference makes general and subject encyclopedias available in a searchable format.
A complete list of available databases and sub-collections is available through our A-Z Database List.
Both EBSCO and ProQuest contain articles from scholarly journals. These journals typically contain articles that include original research and are written by subject experts like doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers or other professionals. These articles are very detailed, lengthy, often written by multiple authors and have a bibliography of cited sources. These journals are also referred to as Peer reviewed or Scientific.
Other publications like magazines or newspapers are considered mass media. The writers of mass media articles are typically not experts on the subject matter, the articles are short and can be read and understood by most readers. Trade publications have articles written by and for people in a specific occupation such as nurses or auto mechanics. These journals are not considered to be scholarly.
Both EBSCO and ProQuest will allow you to limit your searches to scholarly publications. Prior to doing your search check off the box labeled Peer Reviewed.
You can also do this after your search by clicking a link to the side of your results that will remove any non-scholarly articles from your search.
Not sure where to start? Try Academic Search Complete, a multidisciplinary database covering a variety of subjects that is available through the EBSCOhost interface.
Using databases can be quite different than using Google. While Google is designed to respond to the natural way people talk (i.e. complete sentences), databases require you to break your subject down into keywords.
Let's say your research question is
how does heavy metal pollution effect the health of homeless populations
If you typed this complete question into a database, it's going to search for instances of all those words, including the irrelevant ones (how, does, the). You're really only interested in articles that mention the following words or concepts:
These terms are going to serve as your initial set of keywords (also known as search terms).
If you just use these terms to start, you have a pretty good chance of getting relevant results. However, it may be helpful to organize your search terms in a thoughtful way. You may also find that there are other words you can use (like "unhoused" for "homeless" or "breathing quality" for health). This is where Boolean operators come in.
Boolean Operators are three different words -- AND, OR, NOT -- that you can use to organize your keywords:
Let's return to our earlier research question.
We'll start with the keywords we developed:
heavy metals AND health AND homeless
This tells the database to look for articles that mention all of these words.
Pro-tip: it is not necessary to use "AND" as the database automatically assumes that any words you type in must be included.
The more ANDs and keywords you add, the less results you'll get as you are asking the database to narrow its search. However, the articles should be more relevant to you than if you just did a search for "heavy metals" or "health" as they'll have mentioned all of your search terms.
On the other hand, let's say you're not getting enough results. Maybe the scientific literature uses a different word, or maybe there are more than one way to say what you are looking for.
Going back to our original example, "unhoused" is another word we could use for "homeless," so if we combine them using OR like this:
we might get more results that if we just used "homeless" because the database knows to give results that include either word.
We could also use to be more specific about what we are looking for. "Health" is a pretty broad concept, so we could include specific aspects of health to expand our search and the likelihood of getting relevant results. For example, we could try
health OR "lung capacity" OR "blood pressure" OR lifespan
Thus, the OR operator can be used to connect similar words or synonyms together.
The NOT operator is a little tricky to use. You'll only want to use it if unrelated words or concepts keep showing up in your searches. For example, "heavy metals" contribute to pollution but that term is also the name of a musical genre. If you use the NOT operator like this:
you will eliminate any results that are related to music.
Be careful with the NOT operator, though. You could unintentionally eliminate relevant results if the excluded term is still somewhat related to your search!
In most databases you can search on variations of a word by using an asterisk * at the end of a word. For example child* would search for:
child
children
children’s
childhood
Similarly, econ* would search for:
economy
economist
economical
By using truncation you can search for many words in just once search rather than doing multiple searches.
We've talked about keywords and Boolean operators, how do we put these all in the database, though?
We will nest our synonyms/similar terms together in parentheses, and use ANDs to connect it all together:
("heavy metal" OR pollution NOT music) AND (health OR "life expectancy") AND (unhoused OR homeless)
Using the parentheses () helps the database understand how the Boolean operators and keywords relate to each other.
You may have noticed that some of our terms have quotation marks around them and some don't. When your search term is more than one word long, it can be helpful to put quotation marks around it so that the database knows to search the complete phrase.