Find Articles in the UT Libraries - UGS 302 - Live, Play, Communicate, and Learn with Digital Technology - Liu - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

1. Choose a Database

Single articles on a topic are found in our library databases. The UT Libraries pay to have access to these databases and the articles they contain.

You can search in databases that are multidisciplinary or subject-specific.

Multidisciplinary databases contain articles on many topics/from many areas of study. A good place to start for a multidisciplinary search is the main search bar on the library homepage which searches lots of databases or Academic Search Complete.
Subject Specific databases contain articles from specific disciplines like Medicine, English, or Psychology. See your list of suggested databases below.

2. Keywords

Keyword tool
Use this tool to help you brainstorm keywords on your topic.

Searching databases is different than searching in Google. You have to distil what you're looking for into a few key terms or phrases, rather than whole sentences. You also have to think of different ways to say those key terms, because different writers will refer to the same concept using different terms. To turn your topic into keywords or search terms, use this tool, or:

Write down your topic and underline the main concepts (ex. the educational effectiveness of using iPads in the classroom?)

For each main concept, brainstorm a few synonyms and related terms that get at that concept:

Key Concepts

effectiveness

iPad

classroom

Related Terms

assessment

outcomes

performance

tablet

handheld device

bring your own device (byod)

mobile technology

school

curriculum

pedagogy

teaching

Combine key terms using AND and OR:
- AND narrows your search by looking for articles with all of the words (your two or three key concepts should be connected with AND, because you need all of them represented in useful articles).
- OR broadens your search by looking for articles with any of the words (synonyms and related terms should be separated by OR - they get at the same key concepts, so any of them are useful).
Try different combinations of your keywords to get better results as you search:

3. Recommended Databases

Articles and More - advanced search
You can also get to this by clicking articles and more on the library homepage and then Advanced.

Academic Search Complete

ERIC: Education Resources Information Center
Unlimited users.
Updated monthly. Provides a digital library of education-related resources. Contains over 1.1 million citations covering research documents, journal articles, technical reports, program descriptions and evaluations, and curricular materials in the field of education.

Also includes more than 107,000 full text non-journal documents indexed by the ERIC database. Approximately one-half of the entries in the ERIC database are to ERIC documents. Microfiche copies of ERIC documents, including those prior to 1996, are in the Collections Deposit Library (CDL) Microforms Collection at MCFICHE 4913.
Education Source
Unlimited users.
The collection includes full text for more than 1,700 journals, 550 books and monographs, education-related conference papers, citations for over 4 million articles including book reviews and over 100,000 controlled and cross-referenced names of educational tests. Coverage in Education Source spans all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and also includes educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education and testing.

Education Research Guide
A collection of more resources for Education research, created by the Education librarian.

Psychology

PsycINFO (Ebsco)
Unlimited users.
Updated monthly. Indexes and abstracts over 1,700 sources, including international material selected from periodicals written in over 35 languages. Contains current chapter and book coverage with worldwide English-language material published from 1987 to the present, and adds over 60,000 references annually through monthly updates. Covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines.
Has over 1.8 million individual records, some dating back to 1887.
Includes abstracts from Psychological Abstracts back to 1927, Psychological Bulletin from 1921-1926, and all APA journals and the American Journal of Psychology back to their first issues. Corresponds in part to the print index Psychological Abstracts.

Sociology

SocINDEX with Full Text
Unlimited users.
In addition to full-text journals, SocINDEX with Full Text contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895. Includes indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical content sources.

News sources are not peer-reviewed scholarly sources, but may be very up-to-date on your topic. Also try the news filter in a Google search.

Nexis Uni
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.
Alt-Press Watch
Find news articles from small town, city, and rural newspapers.

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Where's the Article?

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.

What are databases?

This video, from RMIT University, explains what a database is...