From the Libraries homepage, under the QuickSearch search box, click: Databases. We have hundreds of databases for articles, e-books, statistics, video, and more. A good way to navigate this very long list is to click the drop-down menu under Subject at the top of the page, select a subject relevant to your proposal, and click Apply. At the top of a list by subject is a Best Bets list, a list of the most useful databases for that subject.
If you have a multi-disciplinary topic, if you want to search for popular as well as scholarly sources, or if you're simply not sure how to get started with your research, try Academic Search Premier. It's a large, multidisciplinary database with a pretty intuitive search interface and lots of full text.
QuickSearch, at the top of the RUL libraries homepage and the New Brunswick Libraries homepage, searches across many, but not all, of the databases. See the page for Searching for articles, reports, news, and other sources in QuickSearch.
With a few exceptions, the rules, the logic of setting up an effective search is uniform across the article databases. Many databases default to Advanced Search. If a database defaults to Basic Search, just a single search box, click on Advanced Search instead. It provides a better range of search options and better control over your search results than Basic Search.
Most databases arrange your search results in relevance order. That is, a database lists what it thinks are the most important, the most relevant articles at or near the top of the list of results. You can click on Relevance and re-sort the search results, for example, in reverse chronological order, Date Newest.
Ways to refine your results:
- If you get a very large initial search result, that may mean that your need or opportunity is too broad to write the kind of proposal you'll write for this course. Food insecurity and children, for instance, is very broad. Consider focusing a broad topic by searching an additional term or terms. Browse through your initial search result and see what sparks your interest. In this case, you might, for example, add to your search: and garden*.
- Most databases have a list of filters to the left of the search results. You can refine, filter, for example, to the most recent articles, to just the peer-reviewed articles, etc.
- Search in just the records of the articles. Most databases, by default, search the full text of the articles in the database, plus the fields in records of the articles: author field, title field, subject headings, abstract etc. Searching just in the records (select Anywhere except full text from the drop-down menu) narrows the scope of your search, makes it more specific.
- Search using a subject heading. Browse the full records in your search result, paying particular attention to the subject heading field. In the example above, most databases use "food security" as a subject. Refining the search with that subject heading will give your search more specificity.
- Check out the articles cited in an article's bibliography. If you find a particularly relevant article in a search result, look at its bibliography to see if it cites other relevant articles. Copy the title of a relevant article and search it, in quotes, in QuickSearch. See the Searching in QuickSearch page for further info.
In your search results, most of the records of the articles, sometimes all of them, will have a link to the full text of the article. If you don't see that link, you'll see a Get@R tab. Get@R will try to link to the full text outside the database.
Most of the time, Get@R will point you to the full text in one or two clicks.
If Get@R can't link to the full text, you'll be directed to a Rutgers University Libraries page that says, Find in Library or How to Get It. Click Sign in and sign in with your NetID. Then click either Article Delivery, Request Item, or Digitization. We'll provide a PDF copy, usually within a day.
In most of the databases, in the full record of an article, click on the link that says Email or on an email icon.
In most databases, to email a batch of article records, in your results list, check off the box to the left of the records you want to save, then click the Email link or email icon.
Also check out the Citing Your Sources page, especially the Citation Managers box. A citation manager, for example, will let you save all of your research in one place and, among other things, will create your citations and build your bibliography as you type your paper.
If you have questions about searching in an article database (or anything else), you can:
- Email Tom Glynn at glynn@rutgers.edu or call him at 848-932-6105.
- Or ask via our 24/7 Chat service.