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

• Tufts Catalog

  The Tufts Catalog will find you books, video and audio recordings, government documents, journal titles, and other material that is owned by the Tufts Libraries (not just Tisch but also the Music, Ginn, Hirsh, and Webster libraries--so be sure to check the location before you head off to Tisch).

  • The Tufts Catalog will NOT find you individual journal articles! Use the Databases and Articles page to locate relevant article databases, then search the individual databases for articles. The library pays for subscriptions to databases that Google can't search.

  • HOW TO SEARCH: AND, OR, NOT (Boolean Operators) and keyword versus subject searching

    • With each new database, check out the "help" or "search tips" file to find out how that database is best searched!

• Reference (English/Bilingual Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Thesauruses)

  • Oxford Reference Online To see list of reference titles included, see here.
  • Credo Reference To see list of reference titles included, see here.

• General Indexes (Good places to start)

  • Academic OneFile (Find both academic and popular-press articles, updated frequently)
  • LexisNexis(updated daily; good for finding newspaper/magazine articles, book/concert reviews, etc.)
    • Sample Philosophy subject database: Philosopher's Index
  • JSTOR is good for finding Full-Text immediately, but usually it does not have the most recent 5 (or more) years of research! Do NOT rely solely on JSTOR for current research.

• Is a journal I've found scholarly/peer-reviewed/refereed? Check Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory here.

• The database only gives me a citation, or just an abstract. How do I find the full text?

  • Use , OR:
    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!

• What if we don't have the article at Tufts?

  • use ILLiad to request it from somewhere that does. It will be scanned in and emailed to your ILLiad account within a few days.

• Evaluating Web Sites

  • Use other Search Engines dedicated to more scholarly web sources.
  • Guidelines for evaluating a website's authority/bias

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