Background Sources, Overviews of Topics for All Four Groups
- Gale eBooks This link opens in a new windowSearchable database of several hundred subject encyclopedias and other reference works across all subject areas, but with particular strengths in the social sciences and humanities. It includes a number of major reference works, and is Northwesterns largest single collection of reference materials. A good source for authoritative background information.
Below are each examples of full encyclopedias within Gale Ebooks.
- The Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health
- The Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Health
- Drugs in American Society : An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law,
- CQ Researcher Plus Archive This link opens in a new windowThe CQ Researcher is a collection of reports covering political and social issues, with regular reports on topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy.
- NUsearch This link opens in a new windowLimit this NUsearch search to Reference Entries as the format type. NUsearch is the main search tool for Northwestern University Library, combining the library catalog with a wealth of other databases and online collections.
General Resources for All Four Groups
Below are resources / research tools that may benefit all four groups!
- NUsearch This link opens in a new windowNUsearch is the main search tool for Northwestern University Library, combining the library catalog with a wealth of other databases and online collections.
- PsycINFO This link opens in a new windowProduced by the American Psychological Association, this database is a comprehensive index to the professional and academic literature in psychology, counseling and related disciplines. Covers 1860-present.
- MEDLINE (via Web of Science) This link opens in a new windowThe MEDLINE database is widely recognized as the premier source for bibliographic and abstract coverage of biomedical literature. MEDLINE encompasses information from Index Medicus, Index to Dental Literature, and International Nursing, as well as other sources of coverage in the areas of allied health, biological and physical sciences, humanities and information science as they relate to medicine and health care, communication disorders, population biology, and reproductive biology.
- Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition This link opens in a new windowThis resource provides more than 580 scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines with partiuclar strength in nursing and allied health.
- PAIS Index This link opens in a new windowIndex focusing on public affairs, public and social policies and international relations. Provides references to journal articles, books, government documents, statistics, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, and more. Covers 1914 to present.
Google Scholar
A free web search that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly research sources. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books. Note the screen shots below to help you set up your Google Scholar to access NU Library full text content.
Keywords and Search Operators
Keywords describe your research topic, and are the nouns that describe the most important words within your thesis or question.
Example topic: Silent Spring and pesticides
Boolean operators include AND, OR, NOT to either narrow or broaden a search. Many databases require operators to be typed in all caps.
With the example topic above, you can use Boolean operators to shift from natural language searching to a keyword search:
silent spring AND (pesticides OR insecticides)
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AND narrows or limits a search by requiring that the results contain both or all search terms/words.
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OR broadens or expands a search by requiring that the results contain either or any of the terms.
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NOT narrows or limits a search by excluding sources with a specified search term.
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Truncation search includes a symbol, most commonly an asterisk * but possibly !, ? or # at the end of a word root to look for various word endings.
- universit* finds university as well as universities; child* finds child, child's, children, pesticide*
Wildcard search uses a symbol, often an asterisk * or ?, in place of an unknown character or characters for words with variant spellings.
- labo*r find labor as well as labour; wom?n finds woman as well as women
Phrase search uses quotation marks " " around phrases or word combinations. This ensures a database searches a term or concept like "artificial intelligence" as a phrase and not as separate words.
- "nature writing" OR "nature writers"
Note: Depending on the database, searching a phrase without quotes may return some results with the exact phrase and some results with terms appearing as separate words in separate contexts. Therefore, some search results may not be relevant to your topic. Experiment with and without quotes to see how results differ and also check the Help screens of specific databases.
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