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WRIT 1110: Seminar in Academic Writing: How to search for articles

The resources listed on this page will help you to become familiar with your University Libraries at BGSU.

Library web site

Generally speaking, our library home page (linked below) is the starting point for accessing all of the resources that we subscribe to and purchase so that BGSU students, staff, and faculty have access to them. You can access both the library catalog (to search for books) and more than 300 databases (to search for articles).

Filter by source type

In Academic Search Complete, you can use a filter on the left hand side of the page to limit by "source types". For example, if you check the box next to "trade publications" the results list will contain only articles published in trade journals/magazines.

Glossary for this page

*database: a structured set of data held in a computer, especially one that is accessible in various ways.

*search engine: a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.

All definitions from Oxford Languages

How to talk to databases

Databases are more structured than internet search engines, so they require an intentional search strategy.

  • In a search engine, your search terms can match words in the full text or the entire web site.
  • In a database, your search terms need to match words in the data that describe the article such as the article title, the journal title, and the abstract (overview) of the article, not necessarily the full text.

Thus, we recommend that you:

  • carefully select the key concepts from your research question and combine those as keywords to search in a database
  • use the worksheet labeled 'generating and combining keywords' below to brainstorm search terms

Which database should I use?

Academic Search Complete is a great starting place for WRIT 1110 students to look for sources because a variety of subject areas are included within it.

Many databases are specialized, meaning that they contain information about a specific subject area. For example, there are psychology databases that contain sources written by and for psychologists and psychology students.