As we learned earlier, the strongest articles to support your academic writing projects will come from scholarly sources. Finding exactly what you need becomes specialized at this point, and requires a new set of searching strategies beyond even Google Scholar.

For this kind of research, you’ll want to utilize library databases, which allow you to search scholarly journals. Many journals are sponsored by academic associations. Most of your professors belong to some big, general one (such as the Modern Language Association, the American Psychological Association, or the American Physical Society) and one or more smaller ones organized around particular areas of interest and expertise (such as the Association for the Study of Food and Society or the International Association for Statistical Computing).

Finding articles in databases

Milne Library invests a lot of time and care into making sure you have access to the sources you need for your writing projects. Our Research Instruction Librarians have created research guides that point you to the best databases for the specific discipline or subject and, sometimes even for a specific course. Librarians are eager to help you succeed with your research—it’s their job and they love it!—so don’t be shy about asking.

The following video demonstrates how to search within a library database. While the examples are specific to Brigham Young University’s library, the same general search tips apply to nearly all academic databases. Get familiar with Milne Library’s homepage to identify the general layout, know where to find databases, catalogs, research guides, and basic library information, and then practice searching for specific articles in different databases to see how they are similar as well as different. These are skills that will be reinforced in Geneseo’s writing seminar, and all INTD 105 sections meet at least once physically in Milne Library, with a Research Instruction Librarian.