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Searching Library Catalogs and Databases

For most college research projects, finding appropriate sources starts with your library’s home page, where you can

find (and sometimes access) books, reference sources (such as general and subject-specific encyclopedias and dictionaries), reports, documents, multimedia resources (such as films and audio recordings), and much more;
use your library’s database to find (and sometimes access) articles in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, as well as in reference sources;
find research guides, lists of reliable sources on topics frequently studied by students.

Many libraries now offer unified search, which allows patrons to search for books and articles in magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals simultaneously, from the home page. If you aren’t sure whether you will need to search for books and articles using separate catalogs and databases, consult a librarian.

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Your library’s home page is also the place to find information about the brick-and-mortar library—its floor plan, its hours of operation, and the journals it has available in print. You might even be able to find links to what you need in other libraries or get online help from a librarian.

Use appropriate search terms.

Just as with a search engine like Google, you can search a library catalog or database by typing your search terms—an author’s name, the title of a work, a subject term or keyword, even a call number—into the search box. To search successfully, put yourself in the position of the people writing about your topic to figure out what words they might have used. If your topic is “ecology,” for example, you may find information under the keywords ecosystem, environment, pollution, and endangered species, as well as a number of other related keywords, depending on the focus of your research and your area of study.

Broaden or narrow your results.

When conducting a search, you may get too few hits and have to broaden your topic.

To broaden your search, try the following:

Replace a specific term with a more general term	Replace sister or brother with sibling
Substitute a synonym for one of your keywords	Replace home study with home schooling or student-paced education
Combine terms with or to get results with either or both terms	Search home study or home schooling to get results that include both home study and home schooling
*Add a wildcard character, usually an asterisk () or question mark (?)** (Check the search tips to find out which wildcard character is in use.)	Search home school* or home school? to retrieve results for home school, home schooling, and home schooled

Most often, you’ll get too many hits and need to narrow your search. To narrow a search, try the following:

Add a specific term	Search not just home schooling but home schooling statistics
Combine search terms into phrases or word strings	Search home schooling and California or “home schooling California”

In many cases, using phrases or word strings will limit your results to items that include all the words you have specified. You may need to insert quotation marks around the terms or insert the word and between them to create a search phrase or word string. Check the search tips for the database, catalog, or search engine you are using.