CASA/Humanities Inclusivity Program (Summer 2023)

Most databases have an Advanced Search option, which will let you search using multiple terms at once. For example:

An asterisk (*) is a truncation symbol that will bring up results using all the letters leading up to (or following) the * -- so, Islam* will bring up both "Islam" and "Islamic" etc.

The search string in the third box got cut off in the image: it should be lgbt or gay or homosexual or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or queer -- the "ors" mean that you're asking for articles that use any of the terms linked by the "ors"

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A database's Advanced Search option will also let you limit your search in a number of ways, including:

• Limit by year of publication (helpful if you need the most current scholarship/literature)
• Limit to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles (this is often just a box you can check)
• Limit by language (if you read a particular language or languages, you can select those; you can also limit your search to just items in English)

For example, here are some options that often appear in Advanced Search:

Different subject databases may have other options as well, but most of our databases have these as Advanced Search options.

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One box that you SHOULD NOT CHECK is the "Full Text" box. Sounds backwards, I know, but here's why:

Many databases will give you only the citation for a particular article and not the full text.

But! We have lots of databases, and the article that you need may be in a different database.

If you find an article that you want, and it looks like we don't have full text, click the blue "Find It @ GSU" button. That button will point you to the article if it's held in another database, or will help you set up an Interlibrary Loan for the article. (If you have a citation for an article, you can also place an Interlibrary Loan request by starting here and following the prompts).

If you check the "Full Text" box in a database, you're actually saying that you only want articles which that particular database has available in "full text." You're shutting off that "Find It @ GSU" option.

   to search names as a phrase | ex: "walter cronkite"

   as a wild card | ex: wom*n

AND between words to NARROW results | ex: cat AND dog

OR between words to EXPAND results | ex: cat OR kitten

The database PubMed works a little differently from the databases mentioned in Jill's session. 

See our PubMed research guide for information about how to search in PubMed. Contact information for our two health-sciences librarians is also available on that guide. 

These other databases are also useful for finding health-related sources:

These are general scholarly databases that cover a wide range of disciplines.

Don't forget to check related research guides to find additional databases for your topic.
To see all of our databases, use our A-Z list.

These databases focus on specific disciplines.

You can also use the "Databases by Subject" dropdown menu on the library's homepage tab to identify relevant databases by subject or discipline.

Subject-specific research guides can also help you find more databases for your topic.