The next journey on building your library search skills is to familiarize yourself with library databases. All our databases are available from the Databases A-Z link on the homepage. Also consider finding the research guide for your major or one closely related to your topic. Lavery Librarians create custom guides for many of the programs and courses offered, and these guides will include selected, "best bet" databases for your projects.
A library database is an organized collection of published information. In a database, you might find articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers, or other types of information.
The library has specialized databases for many subjects, such as psychology, nursing, and history. You can choose a database that matches your subject to find information and resources for your literature search.
Consider the topic and search statement examples from the previous page. Using the sample search statements, see how to conduct a database search.
The first search shown is for ProQuest Central, take look at the images from shown of the advanced search and how the search statement was translated to the database. The second example is a mini-video walking through the steps of searching Business Source Premier, and business-focused database offered through EBSCOHost.
This is a great multi-disciplinary database that can be used to search across subjects. It's a good "best bet" for most topics, and is one of the librarians go-to starter databases.
Notice in the image below each set of nested terms are placed in their own search box. So, in the top search box: ("college students" OR "young adults" OR students); the second search box: ("social media" OR TikTok OR Instagram); and the third search box: ("social change" OR protest OR "social reform"). You can also use filters before running the search, below you can see the checkbox for peer review highlighted and the publication date option circled.
This is a great subject-focused database. Use subject databases when your topic is closely aligned with those available at Fisher. For example, we have a number of Nursing focused databases like CINAHL and PubMed.
Notice in the example mini-video, each set of nested terms are placed into their own search box. In the top box: ("affinity groups" OR "employee resource group"); in the second box: ("early career" OR "career development"), and in the third box: ("African American women" OR "Women of Color"). There is also the opportunity to add "Search Options" that can filter results by publication date or peer review status. This video has no narrative audio, descriptive captions are available.