The Explore RSU Libraries box is a great place to start your research. It searches all of the libraries' resources including books/ebooks, scholarly and news articles, government publications and streaming video. Go to this link to view a short tutorial on searching.
Comprehensive sociology research database, containing full text for 397 "core" coverage journals dating back to 1908, and 150 "priority" coverage journals.
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.
Provides high-quality, full-text journal articles relating to nearly every field of scholarly study. This database specializes in historical content, with some articles dating back to the late 1800s. In most cases, the most recent one to five years are not available in full-text. JSTOR also has more than 11,000 open access, freely available ebooks from 130+ publishers, including Cornell University Press, University College of London, and University of California Press.
Offers deep coverage in applicable areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, renewable energy sources, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more.
APA PsycArticles offers access to the complete electronic catalog of APA peer-reviewed journals, including over 200,000 full-text journal articles, giving researchers the ability to explore more than a century of trusted research across the full collection. Topics include basic, clinical, developmental, educational, and social psychology.
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!