Opticianry (Dale Mabry): Tips and tutorials for searching databases

Quick tips

• Library search tools often work best with just the most important, or key, words, and not long sentences or phrases.
  • One exception might be if the long sentence or phrase is the known title of a work you are hunting down.
• Try writing out how you would describe your topic to a friend, then pick the key words.
• Leave out words such as cause, effect, and comparison, unless these are part of a known title or technical term. 

This video demonstrates how to pick good key words:

HCC's online article databases allow keyword searching for articles from magazines, journals, newspapers, reference sources (such as encyclopedias) and digital resources including streaming video and audio.

Searching

Most library databases, regardless of their subjects, work like the typical ones demonstrated in the video tutorials abelow. In addition, they all provide citations.

Citing