Academic Affairs for Athletics Research Guide: Databases

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So, what is a database? Consider this analogy: A database is like a file cabinet, and journals are like the file folders inside. Just as a file folder holds papers, journals hold articles. Unlike a file cabinet where you must go first to the folder level to get papers, electronic databases allow you to search directly at the article level. So to find articles, look in databases! Some databases hold articles regarding many subject areas and others are more subject-specific. In general, the more focused your research is, the more important it becomes to use subject-specific databases.

Below you will find links to several multidisciplinary databases. These general databases are a great starting point for a wide variety of topics.

Search Tips

• Use the filters or limiters within a database to limit your search to scholarly or peer-reviewed items
• The databases are not designed to search like Google for a natural language question such as:

What are the effects of social media on adolescents?

             Instead, the databases rely on the use of keywords. A good search for the question above might be:

social media AND adolescents

• Database search fields recognize AND, OR, and NOT as Boolean operations when they are typed in ALL CAPS in the search box.

Using AND allows terms to be linked together to narrow and focus your search. For example, if you are trying to locate sources on technology used in the elementary classroom, you could perform one of these searches to focus your results:

1. technology AND “elementary education”
2. technology AND “elementary school”
3. technology AND “elementary school” AND impact

Using OR expands your search and is useful when there is more than one commonly used term or phrase for your topic. For example, you could search:

1. “local food” OR “sustainable eating”

To exclude items in search, you can use the NOT operator to focus your search. For example, you might want to search:

1. animal NOT dog
2. birds NOT penguins

• Placing quotation marks around your search phrase is helpful because doing so will limit results to only items that contain those words in that exact order. This will increase the accuracy of your returned results.