Developed by librarians at Ohio State, this resource allows you to improve your research skills through interactive online tutorials. This innovative e-book can be read on the web or downloaded for later viewing.
If you would like to seek out scholarly articles online, Google Scholar should be on your list of reference sites.
It weeds out general web content to focus strictly on scholarly journals to
give you sources worth citing.
When doing a Google Search, it is important to familiarize yourself with the engine’s operator strings. Try these tips: use quotes to find an exact phrase, use “site:” to search only a specific site, or “–” to exclude a term from your results. You can also use the Advanced Search interface to add criteria like reading level, language, file type, and date, and turn SafeSearch (the content-filtering option) on or off.
This short video provides a guide unique search features of Google Scholar
Tutorial courtesy of Cooperative Library Instruction Project.
Search Engines:
The best search engine in the world is the one that you actually know how to use. Most of them have an advanced search capacity which most people never bother to examine. If you do, you will discover whether the engine accepts search strings in which terms are connected with AND, OR, AND NOT, or whether it recognizes search symbols like + and -. If you really like Google, for instance, find and print out the pages that explain how to do sophisticated searches and keep them for a quick reference.
Click the links below to find out the best way to do effective searching.
Booleans
AND - Commands a search engine to bring back both terms
OR - Commands a search engine to bring back either of the terms
NOT - Commands a search engine to ignore all results with a certain word.
Quick tip: in Google, use a minus sign (-) instead of NOT
Quotation marks
Bring back exact search results. "Ohio State University" means only OSU, no Ohio University too.
What to learn more? Review these sections of Choosing and Using Sources
