These are created by the witnesses or first recorders of events at about the time they occurred.
These sources include analysis of a particular event or topic by experts in the field.
These articles report original research or provide in-depth analysis on a particular topic. Often, these publications are peer-reviewed, or screened by experts in the field.
These sources are written for professionals in a given field and usually include summaries of research, important events and best practices.
Popular sources are intended for a general audience and are meant to inform or entertain. They are typically written by professional staff writers or freelancers.
Check out this research guide: Choosing your sources.
Now that you've been introduced to some of the concepts and tools you will need to find sources, let's look at concrete tactics for how to find sources in the library catalog or online article databases.
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In a keyword search, the database scans every article and every abstract and retrieves anything the contains the words and/or phrases you've typed into the search boxes. To conduct a successful keyword search, you'll want to think of several words or short phrases that you can use to describe your research topic. Then, you'll want to experiment with different combinations. This is where a well-outlined or well-mapped topic will come in handy.
Watch this SHORT VIDEO for a demonstration of keyword searching.
Subject searching requires you to use specific search terms that have been assigned to articles in the database. Most articles have been indexed with a handful of these subject terms that best describe the topic of the article. When you use a subject search, you will have fewer results than a keyword search, but often, these results are more relevant to your topic. To find subject terms, look in article records, to the left of the results list or in the subject thesaurus. (See the "search results" page above for more info.)
Watch this SHORT VIDEO for a demonstration of subject searching.
Sometimes you might want a particular article. If you know where the article was published, you can search for that publication under "Journals" on the library's homepage. This will tell you which library database(s) contains the full-text article.
Watch this SHORT VIDEO to locate a particular article from a citation.
To find enough material for your paper, you should try using several different tools and use a combination of all three tactics.
Web search strategies in plain English - This YouTube video discusses Web search strategies, which can also be used in library catalogs and databases.
Boolean operators - This video explains how to use the words AND, OR and NOT (Boolean operators) to combine keywords and subject terms in your searches.