The Explore RSU Libraries search box on the library website is a great place to start your research. It searches all the library's resources in one place including books/ebooks, journal and news articles and government information.
Reference sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, are great for gathering general information a topic. If you need definitions of words or concepts, statistical information, or background information, reference sources are a good place to start.
While most dictionaries and encyclopedias are credible sources of information, reference sources only summarize topics, and should not be used as a substitute for scholarly research. Some professors will not allow you to cite encyclopedias in research papers, so be sure that you understand the expectations of an assignment beforehand. Finally, be sure to choose reference sources wisely!
Provides full-text access to a growing number of reference sources in literature, history, science, health, and careers.
Current events database exploring social, political & economic issues, scientific discoveries and other popular topics discussed in today’s classrooms. TOPICsearch contains full text for over 139,800 articles from more than 4,800 diverse sources.
Academic Search Complete offers an enormous collection of full-text journals, providing users access to critical information from many sources unique to this database. In addition, it includes peer-reviewed full text for STEM research, as well as for the social sciences and humanities. Scholarly content covers a broad range of important areas of academic study, including anthropology, engineering, law, sciences and more. This is an excellent database to start your research.
U.S. Major Dailies provides access to the five most respected U.S. national and regional newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. The content is available by 8am each day. Coverage: 1980 - current
When looking for physical books, many topics will be grouped together. If you find one or two books on immigration, for example, often several other books on the topic of immigration will be in the same general area.
The "Opposing Viewpoints" series is popular as a starting point for persuasive speeches or papers. These books contain brief writings from a variety of perspectives on given topics. Below is a link to the opposing viewpoints series in the RSU Libraries' catalog
Did you know that when you enter an entire sentence into Google it searches each.. word.. individually? That's why you get millions of results back! Luckily Google does a decent job of returning relevant results from a sentence. Unlike Google, databases can't understand an entire sentence. You will need to break your topic down into the most important ideas, or keywords. Even Google will give you better results if you use relevant keywords!
Exclude irrelevant words
When using the databases, you should exclude all extraneous words from your searches. First, leave out all articles (a, and, the) in your search. Next, narrow your search terms down to two or three words that describe exactly what you hope to find For example, if you are writing a paper about the theme of discrimination in Frankenstein, narrowing your search terms down to discrimination and Frankenstein will likely retrieve a manageable list of more precise results.
After you have selected your initial search terms, list any synonyms or related terms that might be relevant to your topic. For example, if your search terms are Frankenstein and discrimination, you might want to try synonyms such as "prejudice" or "intolerance" in place of discrimination. You may even replace discrimination with a related term, such as "inhumanity." Successful searches are often the result of trying out a variety of terms. Most databases will provide you with suggestions of additional or alternate search terms to use, which can lead you to better results in a shorter amount of time.
Once you've broken down your research topic into keywords you can start searching more in-depth using filters and other search tools. The boolean operators and, or, & not can help you combine keywords to retrieve results directly related to your topic. Boolean operators are like a type of filter and can be used in just about any search bar, including databases and Google!
Most library databases have built in search tools such as filters.
Here are some useful filters:
You can also view the Advanced Search for more filters and tools!