CST 110: Articles & Databases

Before doing any searching, you need to develop a search strategy. Before developing a strategy, you need to have an idea for your research topic.

The term "search strategy" is used to describe the keywords and techniques you will use to find information on your research topic.

Once you've come up with a thesis statement, you should brainstorm a list of keywords related to that statement. For instance, if your thesis or research topic is "Climate change is the primary contributor to melting Arctic ice sheets." Then your keywords might be: 

Developing a list of keywords prior to beginning your search is a great way to save time and increase your flexibility as you look for relevant information.
For a more in-depth look into keywords and how to use them, you can watch the video below. 

Once you have developed your list of keywords, you'll need to think about how best to combine them to find the information you need. Strategies like phrase searching, and using boolean operators and truncation will be invaluable as you begin your research. 

Watch the videos below to learn how to use these three strategies in a database.

Using an article database is the most efficient way to find authoritative & accurate articles.

• An article database is collection of articles that is designed to be searchable. 
• Unlike using Google to search the web, the majority of items inside of an article database are articles published in scholarly or trade journals.  

There are two ways to access Murphy Library databases: by title or by subject. We'll focus on using Databases by Title. Click here for a screenshot of how to access the Databases by Title (Links to an external site.).

We have about 240 article databases.  You do not need to search in all of them!  

We'll focus on the database Academic Search Ultimate.  This is a great database to use for many different topics.    

Click here (Links to an external site.) to get back to Murphy Library's homepage.

Let's do a search. We'll use the research topic and search strategy listed below.

Research topic: How reality TV depicts teen pregnancy

Search Strategy: reality TV AND pregnancy

1. 1. If you have not already, click on the Databases by Title (Links to an external site.) link in the Search@UW dropdown menu.
   2. Type Academic Search Ultimate into the search box and click on the green search button.
   3. Choose Academic Search Ultimate (Links to an external site.) from the list of databases. ASU is a great multidisciplinary article database to begin your research. 

Note: If you are off-campus, you may be prompted to enter your NetID and password to gain access to the database.

Now that we're in the database, we can use our search strategy to find articles about our topic.

In this database, we should separate concepts by putting each one in a different search box.  

1. Enter reality television in the first search box
2. Enter pregnancy in the second search box
3. Need Help? Look at this search example (Links to an external site.)
4. Click on the green Search button.
5. The search returns a list of articles.

We received back a manageable number of search results.  With this amount of results, we can quickly scan through the titles to select the most relevant articles.  

But, we could make our search more specific if we wanted even fewer results.   

Our first search strategy was reality TV and pregnancy.  This was a keyword search.  We picked the important ideas from our topic using our own words.  To make the search more specific, we should use a subject search. 

Subject terms are not the same as keywords. 

• Subject terms are tags applied to articles based on what the article is about.  
• Subject terms could be the same as our keywords for a topic, but they may be more technical and specific. 
• Subject terms are the preferred search language of the database.

Watch this video on subject heading searching in EbscoHost databases (Academic Search Ultimate) and then click on the next arrow to practice a search of your own.

We can use the results of our first keyword search to find subject terms for our research topic.

1. From the results list for our first search, click on the title, Risky, Dramatic, and Unrealistic: Reality Television Portrayals of Pregnancy and Childbirth and their Effects on Women's Fear and Self-Efficacy.
2. Look at the list of subject terms assigned to the article (Links to an external site.). One of the subject terms is ATTITUDES toward pregnancy. Adding this subject term to our search may help us locate articles that discuss the ways in which pregnancy is portrayed on television and how that influences our understanding of pregnancy. 
3. Go back to your search box at the top of the screen. You should still your original search (reality tv AND pregnancy). Now, add ATTITUDES toward pregnancy to the third search box.
4. Then change the value in the Select a Field box (Links to an external site.), located to the right of the search box, to SU subject terms.
5. Click on the green Search button. 
6. By performing a subject search, you've retrieved a much more specific set of articles to use in your research.

If you need more practice with subject searching, watch the "Subject Headings" video again and try a few more searches on your own.

Once you have performed a keyword or subject search, you'll need to evaluate your list of results and choose the best articles for your research. 

On the left-hand side of your screen, you will see a column labeled Refine Results. (Links to an external site.)

You can also narrow down by Publication Date and Source Type to further refine your list of results.

**Note: If you already have a small set of results, you may not see a change when using the "Refine Your Results" feature. These features work best when you have a large set of results to work with.

The video below offers a brief and clear explanation of the differences between scholarly & popular sources and how to identify a scholarly or peer-reviewed article. You may see this as an option in the Refine Your Results column.

Try It: Now that we have refined our search results, we can begin to look at individual articles.

1. Click on the blue, hyperlinked title of any article on the page that looks interesting to you.
2. Once you're in the article record you can read the article abstract*

*A summary of an article or resource's content. An abstract usually appears at the beginning of a scholarly or technical article. Databases and indexes often contain abstracts that can help you decide whether an article is relevant for your purposes.

In addition to searching by keyword and subject term, you can search by article title, author, journal title, and year.

Try It: Practice finding an article in the database. Use the APA citation below to find the article in Academic Search Ultimate.  

Ghadery, F. (2019). #Metoo—has the “sisterhood” finally become global or just another product of neoliberal feminism? Transnational Legal Theory, 10(2), 252–274. 

Watch this short video for help interpreting the citation.

All of the following options are located on the right-hand side of the page in Academic Search Ultimate, but may be located elsewhere in a different database. 

Permalink: (Links to an external site.) Most research databases include a link in the article record. Copying and pasting the URL from the address bar may not work in the future as these links are usually session-specific. Use the Permalink icon on the right-hand side of the page to generate a link back to your article.

Email: (Links to an external site.) To email an article from a library database to yourself, use the e-mail icon and follow the on screen instructions.The procedure will vary slightly, depending on which database you are using. You need to be clear on what information you are emailing.

Cite: (Links to an external site.) For help citing the article, click on the link in the right-hand menu. This will give you a variety of citation formats for your article.

Most of the articles that you find in Academic Search Ultimate are available in full-text, but some are not. If that is the case, you need to use the orange Find It! button to locate the full-text in a different database. The Find It! button will appear in every Murphy Library database when the full-text of an article isn't immediately available.

Try It: We're going to search for this article:

Braun, L., Tichy, A., Peham, C., & Bockstahler, B. (2019). Comparison of vertical force redistribution in the pads of dogs with elbow osteoarthritis and healthy dogs. Veterinary Journal, 250, 79–85.

1. In Academic Search Ultimate, click on the New Search link in the blue bar at the top of the web page.
2. Type the title of the article into the first search box.
3. Change the value in the Select a Field box to TI Title.
4. Click on the green Search button.
5. Click on the orange Find It! button at the bottom of the record. A new window will open. Close it to return to this tutorial.
6. If the full-text of the article is available in another database, you will see green text indicating that the source is available as well as blue links to other databases.
7. Click on one of the blue database links.
8. Sometimes the article is not available in full-text. Then you can request it through Resource Sharing or ILL, and usually, it will be sent to your email address as a PDF within a few days.

Watch this short video on how to place a resource sharing request.

View a Screenshot (Links to an external site.) of the steps on this page.

If you encounter a problem getting the full-text, you can always use the Report a Problem link. This link results in a form that goes directly to Murphy Library’s E-Resources staff, who will work with you to get you the information you need.