Trying out a database - Social and Behavioral Sciences

Working on a last minute paper? Need scholarly articles from the social sciences area? Then take a look at http://www.sciencedirect.com/college - a database containing over 350 titles with full-text articles as well as citations to other titles. Search hint: From this database, click on "search" at the green bar, and choose, e.g., to search journals and then either select "all journals" or "subscribed" journals. The subscribed journals are the full-text titles.

Welcome Back

Hopefully you had a great Thanksgiving weekend and are ready for the finish of the semester. The homestretch you've been preparing for all semester begins today. The library hopes to provide you with a comfortable, quiet environment so you can study for finals and prepare final papers.

Please feel free to let us know if something in the library is disrupting your study. We will do all we can to provide a great environment.

Shortened Week for Thanksgiving

The library will only be open 2 days this week due to the Thanksgiving Holiday. We will have normal hours on Monday and Tuesday (8 AM to 9 PM) and then close the rest of the week. We will reopen Monday, November 27th.

Have a great holiday!

Identifying and gathering materials for research

• To locate books use the Online Catalog.
• To locate magazine articles, begin your search with these periodical databases: Academic Search Elite/EBSCOhost; WilsonSelectPlus/FirstSearch.
• For newspaper articles, search Lexis-Nexis. Select the news category and when at the search boxes screen select general news and major papers to set up your search.
• The library's References and Text web page includes Reference databases to biographies (American National Biography and Biography Reference Bank) and dictionaries from Oxford English Dictionary database and Oxford Reference Online Premium.
• Need government info? Select Google Uncle Sam at http://www.google.com/ig/usgov

For each resource you use, create a list of possible subject words or keywords that will bring up results. Remember, different resources may require different search terms. If you are utterly confused, ask the library staff for help. Remember, if you login at the Online Catalog, you can view and access many of the library's databases on or off campus.

Search tips - Online Catalog and Databases

Truncation allows you to search for a root form of a word and pick up any endings. Do not truncate a word too short, or you will retrieve unwanted matches. Example: Politic* will retrieve: politics, political, politically, politician, politicians.
Use quotations around phrases like "lake michigan" to ensure that the words are searched side by side.