Tips on Searching a Database
- Watch this short video (5 minutes) for some tips on searching library databases to find scholarly resources.
- Want some hands on practice before you start searching? Try our short interactive tutorial to help you select and refine your research paper topic and search for scholarly articles.
Find Scholarly Sources
- Criminal Justice Abstracts This link opens in a new window Criminal Justice Abstracts contains more than 400,000 records selected from the most important sources within the discipline. Subject areas covered include: criminology; criminal justice; criminal law and procedure; corrections and prisons; police and policing; criminal investigation; forensic sciences and investigation; history of crime; substance abuse and addiction; probation and parole. View the EBSCO Search Tutorial Video
- National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Virtual Library contains bibliographic information and abstracts of more than 230,000 collection resources and over 80,000 online materials, including all known Office of Justice Programs' works. Use the search filters and sorting options provided to narrow down your results from the Abstract Database.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Academic Search Complete is the world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. Indexing and abstracts for more than 12,500 journals and more than 13,200 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,400 journals. View the EBSCO Search Tutorial Video
- JSTOR Archival Journal & Primary Source Collection This link opens in a new window The JSTOR Archival Journals and Primary Sources Collection contains all licensed JSTOR archival journals and primary sources content in a single collection, including Archive Journal Collections and thematic collections; specifically, it includes Arts & Sciences I – XV, Business IV, Hebrew Journals, Ireland, Jewish Studies, Life Sciences, Public Health, Lives of Literature, Security Studies, and Sustainability journal collections. It also contains four primary source collections, 19th Century British Pamphlets, World Heritage Sites: Africa, Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa, and Global Plants. This collection contains 2,877 high quality academic journals from across a wide range of disciplines and hundreds of thousands of primary source items.
- Ethnic Diversity Source This link opens in a new window With its curated full-text materials, Ethnic Diversity Source is essential to support the study of African Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, Jewish Americans, Latino/Latina/Latine Americans, Multiracial Americans, and Native Americans, among others, with respect to their cultures, traditions, social treatment, and lived experiences. Scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, historical documents, and biographies are complemented by primary sources, such as speeches and interviews. Complete with robust collections of videos and e-books, Ethnic Diversity Source creates a dynamic research experience for students and researchers. View the EBSCO Search Tutorial Video
- LGBTQ+ Source This link opens in a new window LGBTQ+ Source contains all of the content available in LGBT Life as well as full text for more than 140 of the most important and historically significant LGBTQ+ journals, magazines and regional newspapers, plus full text for 150 monographs/books. It includes both scholarly and popular publications covering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues, with comprehensive indexing and abstract coverage as well as a specialized LGBTQ+ Thesaurus containing over 10,000 terms. View the EBSCO Search Tutorial Video
- Diversity & Ethnic Studies eBook Collection This link opens in a new window This subscription collection includes academic eBooks related to diversity, anti-racism, ethnic studies, disability studies, gerontology & age studies, migration studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. The collection utilizes outside resources and scholarship to ensure that the collection remains up to date and aligned with current research. View the EBSCO Search Tutorial Video
- In Context: Opposing Viewpoints This link opens in a new window Opposing Viewpoints offers material to support differing views to help develop critical thinking skills on thousands of current social topics in the forms of primary source documents, statistics, websites and multimedia. Find overviews, news, and opinions on hundreds of today's important social issues, including racism, capital punishment, global warming, and voting rights with reference sources, newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly journals, court cases, government documents, viewpoints, maps, images, audio, video and websites.
- Issues & Controversies This link opens in a new window Featuring a dynamic design and a wealth of features, Issues & Controversies helps researchers understand today's crucial issues by exploring hundreds of hot topics in politics, government, business, society, education, and popular culture. Issues and Controversies provides up-to-date, in-depth and objective information on prominent and hotly debated issues. It combines objective analysis with clear explanations of opposing points of view. Chronologies, illustrations, maps, tables, sidebars, bibliographies and contact information augment the balanced, accurate coverage of current and historical events.
- Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection is a comprehensive database covering information concerning topics in emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry & psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational & experimental methods. This is the world's largest full text psychology database offering full text coverage for nearly 400 journals.
Since you are searching within a single journal rather than a database with hundreds of journals, you'll want to keep your search to only one or two keywords to get results. If, for example, you are curious about the impact of solitary confinement on the mental health of prisoners, it would be best to just search for solitary confinement and then scan the article titles for mental health related words.