How do I find an article?
Answer
Please start by navigating to https://library.park.edu or by clicking "Library" in your Canvas course. Then click on "Start your Research."
At this point you may choose to use Pirate Search, which searches most of our databases at once. Enter the article title or other keywords, and search. Pirate Search is best used for:
- exploring your topic,
- doing general or LE course research, or
- identifying keywords and databases that are a good fit for your research.
Or you can click on Databases to select a database by subject, name, or database type. Some databases are great for finding peer reviewed articles, while others are better for data, statistics, biographical information, and reference information.. The database list offers filters at the top of the page. Searching a subject-specific database will give you fewer results over all, but more of them will be directly related to your targeted subject area.
When searching a database for articles, be sure to identify the most important parts of your research question as keywords. Databases can't search like Google using full sentences, so you need to identify the important keywords in your search. For more information on keywords, see our Searching Smarter guide.
To search within a database, input keywords relevant to your topic. You can put key phrases in quotation marks, so it searches for the entire phrase, and connect keywords together using AND. For example, searching "human resources" AND "organizational training" would bring up results that use both of those complete phrases. Once you've performed a search, you can refine your results by date, publication, whether there's a full text available, whether the source is peer-reviewed, and many other filters.
If you're still having trouble, please ask a librarian to help you!