Research Guides: Graduate Student Library Resources and Services: Databases

Not sure where to start? Try these:

BioOne
A suite of full text peer-reviewed bioscience research journals.
eBook Academic Collection
Offers over 240,000 e-books. This multidisciplinary collection includes thousands of e-books covering a wide selection of academic subjects and features e-books from leading publishers and university presses.
JSTOR
Full-text archive of scholarly publications in mathematics, science, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences.
Primo
Search almost everything!
PubMed Central
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Open access full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Library of Medicine (NLM).
Science Direct
Searches peer reviewed articles. Full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,400 journals and books. (Provider: Elsevier)
SciFinder
A research discovery tool that provides access to research from many scientific disciplines, including biomedical sciences, chemistry, engineering, materials science, agricultural science, and more. To create an account or learn more visit ESF's SciFinder guide.

Database searching tips

In general, these tips work for most databases. Always check out the "Help" menus to see all of the helpful search tips to give you the most accurate results.

AND- Narrows down the search

example: environment AND policy AND carbon

OR- Broadens your search

example: "climate change" OR "Global Warming"

NOT- Excludes terms from results (use with caution)

example: "greenhouse gas" NOT carbon

Truncation * - Allows you to search for variations on a term

example: ecolog* returns ecologist, ecology, ecological, etc.

Wildcard ? - Allows you to search for alternate spellings within words

example: colo?r will find color or colour

Tilde ~ - Proximity search which returns results within a specified range of words

example: "ecology economics" ~8 returns results that have those 2 words separated by no more than 8 words.

Stemming # - Finds variations of a word,

example: went# finds went, go, and going

Quotes " "- Results have the exact phrase as entered

example: "Energy return on investment"

Parenthesis ( )- Allows you to combine many or these search strategies in a single search box

("greenhouse gas*" or "global warming") and carbon

There are many more great tips in database help screens.