BOS 101: Boston Childhoods: Finding Scholarly Sources

Keywords are...

• A good way to start a search.
• The important concepts in your own words.
• Found anywhere in the article (title, author, subject terms, etc.).
• Very flexible.

Connecting concepts...

• Join similar ideas or alternate terms with "OR."
• Link different parts of your topic with "AND."
• Exclude concepts with "NOT."

Limit to Peer-Reviewed, Referred or Scholarly articles...

• This is part of the publication & editorial process for academic and research journals.  Being peer-reviewed is a sign that a paper's author(s) have done a certain level of due diligence in their work and their research is complete, manages conflicts-of-interest, and is fair and objective.

Narrow the Date Range...

• When looking for Current Research or Evidence-Based Practices limit your date range to the last 3-5 years.

Still not finding anything?  Ask a Librarian!

Below is an example to demonstrate how the main concepts from a research topic or question become keywords and how synonyms or related terms can broaden your search:

Now that you've created your list of keywords, you will need to combine them using BOOLEAN operators (AND and OR):

When you're looking at search results in a database you're going to see a few different ways to get to the full article, usually either...

 or   

Both of these will take you to the article!

Click the Find Full-Text button and a new tab or window will open. In this tab, your article will load automatically. You will also see a YELLOW ribbon with a link saying "Go To Full Text Finder Results"--click the link if the article doesn't load on its own.