A database is used for discovering scholarly journal articles in your subject area. Here are some things you will want to keep in mind when searching.
Search using keywords.
Think about how others may identify your topic and use synonyms to retrieve additional articles.
Use appropriate boolean search operators to connect your keywords (AND, OR, NOT).
Use limiters within the database for such things as narrowing your topic to a specific date range or type of publication. Remember you need to us scholarly peer-reviewed articles (see video).
Read the abstracts. Don't judge an article by it's title. Read the abstract before deciding if you want to save the article to potentially use in your research.
Below are some databases recommended for the subject areas your topics may fall within.
Research to the scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences.
n the related disciplines of education, medicine, business, sociology, psychiatry and communications. Includes journals and dissertations from 1967 to the present in one database, and book chapters and books from 1987 to the present in a second database.The databases are in English and the journals covered are in 30 languages from over 45 countries. The databases provide citations, content summaries (for all but the dissertations), and indexing using terms from the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. Book records also contain the book's table of contents.
