For this assignment, you might need several types of sources:
| Source Type | Start Here |
|
Scholarly Articles |
The Library Databases, see recommendations below |
|
Reports from government agencies or other organizations |
Google or on a specific site (like NASA or SETI). Use recommendations and Google Search Tips below. Make sure to evaluate potential sources. |
| Journalism/News | Google News or the UT Libraries NexisUni database. Make sure to evaluate unfamiliar publications. |
| Background Information | Wikipedia can be a place to start for overviews and backgrounds, published encyclopedias are available in Gale ebooks. |
| Fiction, other sources |
Mine the bibliography in the sources you've found! Try searches that include the theme you're interested in and science fiction. Look at the Science Fiction guide. Use the google search tips to find organizations that may work on your topic. Remember to evaluate these organizations! |
Searching databases is different than searching Google. Distil what you're looking for into a few key terms or phrases, rather than whole sentences.
|
Key Concepts |
Fermi Paradox | Rare Earth | |
| Related Terms |
Drake Equation Extraterrestrials Aliens
|
Planetary habitability Earth environment habitability |
|
Background and overviews
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. A database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources. Fully searchable across all files.
For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
Multidisciplinary Databases - contain scholarly articles and more
Unlimited users.
Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. The Web of Science Core Collection is a group of databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1900-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present) that together cover more than 21,000 journals across all disciplines. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present) tracks thousands of additional journals that are being considered for inclusion in the main citation indexes. Other files track references from conference proceedings (1990-present) and citations to books (2005-present).
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
Unlimited users.
Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
News/Journalism
Unlimited users.
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Google Search Tips:
EID login required
This video, from RMIT University, explains what a database is...
If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click FIND IT AT UT to find it in another database or in print in the Libraries.
If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click GET A SCAN to have the article emailed to you. This option will take a few days.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.