This page should help you find out everything that you need to know to search for articles. This page will help you select the best database for your subject and how to do the search. It will help you narrow your topic for a focused search which will get you the results you need. It will help you determine if an article is from a magazine or a journal or if it is scholarly (peer-reviewed) or not.
If you have questions or need help, contact Common's Reference Desk in Helm (270 745-6125) or your subject specialist librarian.
For best results if you are looking for an article you will need to search a database to do it.
Google is a wonderful resource for many things. It can answer lots of questions and is a quick way to get a very broad idea about a subject. Google will give you results, too many results to go through effectively. And all your results will be web pages. If you're lucky, you may get a few articles with your search, but often they will want you to pay to access the article. And since ANYONE can put up a web page, it means you can't always be sure the information you are getting is valid. It will certainly NOT be scholarly.
Searching for a subject where you need to get journal articles or other scholarly results is best done using a database. That is why you need to look at the Databases that the Library has purchased on your behalf (they're listed on the Library Home Page, just click on the Databases link).
Database results don't contain ANY websites. Databases mainly contain Journal Articles (and sometimes Newspaper Articles, Books, Book Chapters, and Thesis, depending on the database). These articles will come from magazines and scholarly journals. EVERYTHING you find as a result of your search in a Database has been published. This means an editor or editors have looked at the material and made sure the facts were right in the article; made sure the article was well written, grammatically correct and properly cited.
Databases work best when you search one or two keywords (or a short phrase) to locate what you need.
Different Search Strategies video created by ProQuest.
Google uses natural language searching, which means, you can ask Google to:
Find a chicken casserole recipe,
or How do I change the battery in my F150 truck?
or What should I feed my otter?
without worrying about how you ask your question.
Google will give you results, LOTS of results, and usually the answer you want with these questions in Google. But searching for a subject where you need to get journal articles and other scholarly results is not easy using Google, or even Google Scholar.
That is why you need to look at the Databases that the Library has purchased on your behalf. Database results don't contain ANY websites. Databases mainly contain Journal Articles (and sometimes Newspaper Articles, Books, Book Chapters, and Thesis, depending on the database). These articles will come from magazines and scholarly journals. EVERYTHING you find as a result of your search in a Database has been published. This means an editor or editors have looked at the material and made sure the facts were right in the article; made sure the article was well written, grammatically correct and properly cited. Databases don't use natural language searching, so you need to use one or two key words (or short phrases) to search to get the results you need.
How to determine which database to use for your subject area.
WKU Libraries Home Page has a link to Research Guides which are library information pages (like this one) for every major and minor WKU offers. If you are not sure what database to use, visiting the Research Guide for your Subject will help you determine where to look. Each guide has a tab labeled Articles and Databases. Click on the Articles and Databases Tab to find a listing of which are the best databases to use for searching for material in your specific subject area. For Example, the Business Research Guide would recommend a business major search in a database like ABI Inform, or Business Source Premiere. Psychology majors would find databases like: PsycInfo, or Pscyhology and Behavioral Sciences Collection to be recommended as their best choice for research in their major field.
Usually researchers start out looking for a topic which gives them a huge number of results (in Google or the Databases). To get more precise results from your search you will need to narrow your topic.
Use some open ended questions to help refine your topic:
Make a Plan
Why should I do this?
