Reading Difficult Scholarly Sources
Do scholarly sources seem dry, boring, and difficult? This pdf will outline strategies to make them easier to read.
Critical Reading Guide
This website gives information, infographics, and videos on the basics of reading for research.
How to (seriously) read a scientific paper
Reading scientific papers becomes easier with experience, but the stumbling blocks are real. Take a look at these top tips to help you read your research.
Refining Search Results
This video will explain how to brainstorm a topic before you begin searching, refine your search based on your results, and manage your search results.
Search Tip: Truncation
Increase the effectiveness of your searches by adding truncation, a database tip to make searching easier
Boolean Tutorial (AND OR NOT)
Practice your skills with Boolean operators in this quick tutorial. It will help you understand this easy search technique.
Boolean Operators Infographic
One of the basic techniques for searching is using the Boolean Operators. Boolean searching is a symbolic logic system that creates relationships between concepts and words.
How Library Stuff Works: Boolean
Learn how to use the Boolean Operators AND/OR/NOT to target and refine your search
Truncation Tutorial
Truncation helps you look for plurals and different spellings of a word. This tutorial will help you understand how to use it.
Best Kept Secret: Subject Terms vs. Keywords
This video will help you understand the difference between searching by keywords vs. subject terms in library databases. This is the best kept secret of searching!
Quick Tips for Searching Infographic
Created by MSJC Librarians, this quick reference will get you the 5 best tips for getting your best search results.
Although CQ doesn't have scholarly articles, it's a reputable source as a place to start building your knowledge, developing your thesis, and gathering your argument--or even choosing a topic! Every report is written by an experienced journalist and features comments from experts, lawmakers and citizens on all sides of every issue with numerous charts, graphs and sidebar articles.
Much like CQ Researcher, Opposing Viewpoints is a source for information on today's hottest social and controversial issues. This research guide features viewpoint articles, topic overviews, full-text magazine, and newspaper articles, primary source documents, statistics, images and podcasts, and links to Websites.
Best Bet! Ebsco is a great place to start searching for more in-depth resources, especially if your instructor is requiring scholarly articles. It also has other formats, like magazines, newspapers, and ebooks, and it combines a lot of databases on different subjects into one search.
JSTOR is another great option for scholarly journal articles or academic ebooks. If you can't find what you're looking for with Ebsco, try this!
If the previous databases don't give you exactly what you want, you can check out our A-Z Database list.
