LIBRARY RESEARCH BASICS
Step One - Plan your paper: Research Paper Navigator
Step Two - Set up RefWorks to organize and format your citations: more info
Step Three - Research
If you want to find information about someone (i.e. literary criticism of an author, biographical information), try a Subject search.
Example Subject Searches
- Sayles, John
- McDormand, Frances
If you are searching for information on topics such as multiculturalism or western films, try a Keyword search.
Use the connectors AND, OR, or NOT to join more than one topic/keyword.
Example Keyword Searches
- multiculturalism and education
- western** and (film or movie)
Note: In the Library Catalog two asterisks ** are needed for truncation, whereas in many databases only one asterisk * is needed--but ALWAYS CHECK THE HELP SCREEN IN EVERY DATABASE to learn how to do the best (and fastest) searches!
Finding Articles in the Library Databases |
To search for articles using the library databases, go to the Tisch Library Website
and select Databases and Articles under Searching.
Type in the name of the database in the search box or use the A-Z list to locate it. |
| Use the following collections to find articles about your topic. |
- Academic OneFile - Includes over 8,000 peer-reviewed journals, the majority in full-text. Extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects. Some full text available, in both PDF and HTML.
- ERIC - This major education index includes citations and abstracts to journals, books, and documents. Includes material in child psychology. Tisch Library subscribes to ERIC documents on microfiche from 1975 to the present and subscribes to ERIC documents electronically from 1996 to the present.
- Current Contents Connect A current awareness database with a multidisciplinary focus, covering over 8,000 of the world's scholarly journals grouped into the following broad disciplinary areas: Agriculture, Biology, & Environmental Sciences; Art & Humanities; Clinical Medicine; Engineering, Computing & Technology; Life Sciences; Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences; Social & Behavioral Sciences.
- LexisNexis - Includes full-text articles from American and international newspapers. Also provides sources for legal research, congressional information, statistics, business information, and environmental research.
Finding Materials at Other Libraries |
- If you want to search for books on your topic beyond what's available at the Tufts University Libraries use WorldCat. You can access this database on the Databases & Articles page.
- If you want to borrow a book that is not available at Tufts University Libraries, follow these steps:
- Search the Boston Library Consortium Virtual Catalog by clicking on its link along the top menu of the Library Catalog. This catalog contains the book holdings at most of the BLC libraries. Users can directly request books through the catalog and pick up the books at Tisch Library.
- If the book is not available through the BLC Virtual Catalog, Submit an online request through the document delivery service - ILLIAD. Users are notified when the material arrives at Tisch. You can sign up for an ILLiad account by clicking on First Time Users at the ILLiad home page.
- Articles not available in full-text through our libraries' databases and print collections can be requested through ILLiad. You can sign up for an ILLiad account by clicking on First Time Users at the ILLiad home page.
- You can also use ILLiad directly within the databases.
The database only gives me a citation/just an abstract. How do I find the full text?
- Use
, OR (if it isn't working):
- look up the journal title (not the article title) by using the JOURNAL TITLE search option in the library catalog to find out if we own it electronically or in print. Be sure to check the range of dates we own before running to the shelves!
Is a journal I've found scholarly/peer-reviewed/refereed?
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