How to find Articles at Ohio University Libraries

Searching for articles from the library is an important skill for you to have as you work on assignments for your classes. Often, you'll be asked to use peer-reviewed sources for papers or other projects. The library is the best resource you have as an Ohio University student access academic articles for free. In this video, we will go over how to turn a research question into a search and find articles from the library. Starting at ohio.edu/library, you'll see a search box in the middle of the page. This is where you will begin your search. The left-hand side of the search box gives us a drop-down menu. Since we're looking for articles, we'll leave it on articles and more. Now, we'll have two options to search here. We can use the search box as is and start typing our keywords. Or, we can use the advanced search by clicking the link located under the white search box. To start your search, you will first need to figure out a search topic and keywords. The library catalog is a powerful search tool, but it does not understand plain language searches like Google. For example, if you're writing a research paper about the impact social media use has on mental health in high school students, you wouldn't be able to search how does social media impact the mental health of high school students. Instead, you will need to identify keywords to search the library catalog. Keywords are usually a noun. For simple searches, you can type a single keyword in search box. A simple search is a great starting point if you're just starting your research and trying to narrow down a topic. But, for more specific research questions, you will want to use the advanced search. Advanced search gives you the most control and precision over your results. Instead of typing a sentence, you combine keywords using Boolean operators like and and or. This type of searching tells the database exactly how concepts should relate to each other. Or expands your search by including synonyms or related terms. And narrows your search by requiring multiple concepts to appear together. Advanced searching is especially useful when you have a focused research question, you're getting too many unrelated results with other search tools, and you want scholarly articles that match very specific criteria. Let's go back to the research question, how does social media impact the mental health of high school students? In this example, you would use the keywords social media, mental health, and high school students. You connect the keywords in your search by using the Boolean search operator and. Social media and mental health and high school students. You can use these keywords to do a search and find articles. However, you can broaden your search by finding synonyms to your keywords. Just like how some people say soda or pop to refer to the same thing, people publishing articles may also use different words for the same topic. You can use the Boolean search operator or to connect the synonyms. Social media or social networking or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. And mental health or mental well-being or anxiety or depression or psychological health or mental illness. And high school students or high schoolers or teens or teenager or adolescent. If you aren't sure what keywords might be best for your research question, you can use the Ask Anything search tool, which allows you to search the library by asking a question. It is an AI-powered tool that searches only library resources. You can see what keywords the tool came up with by clicking generated query in the gray box at the top of the screen. This will let you see some keywords that might be helpful for your search and let you adjust the search from there. If I do an advanced search using the Boolean search we created from the keywords and synonyms, the search yielded this many results, which is too many. So, let's click on the green link that says all filters at the top left corner. That will open a panel on the left side to adjust your search results. In the left-hand side, I may want to select peer-reviewed journals so that I'm getting credible sources. If I scroll down some, I can click on creation date and limit my search results to the past 5 years. Filtering your search result by creation date is helpful to make sure you're finding the most recent articles with the most up-to-date information. And often, your professors will require you to use sources that are published within the last 5 to 10 years, depending on the topic. Once I'm done, I will click on apply filters at the bottom left side of the webpage, which now gives me this many results. Let's take a look at this article, The Role of TikTok in students' health and well-being. This article is available online, so you can click the get PDF link in the green text, and it will either download immediately or take you to the reading online. You can also click on the gray quotation marks on the right-hand side of the record, and it will generate citations for you based on the citation style you choose. Make sure to double-check the citations for accuracy and formatting. But what if you find an article that you really want to read, but the library doesn't have access to it? Such as this title here, Pedagogy of the Dead: K-12 Teaching and Learning Inspired by the Grateful Dead. Make sure you're logged in with your Ohio ID, then you can click on the request through interlibrary loan link located in the middle of the webpage. Once you click on that, it'll auto-fill out a ticket system and a librarian will reach back out to you with access to the article. In addition to searching the library catalog, which searches everything the library has access to, as well as things beyond our library, you can search directly in a database. Some databases are large collections of articles covering multiple topics, such as Academic Search Complete. Others are more specific to different subject and fields, such as JSTOR or PubMed. You can search available databases by visiting http://libguides.library.ohio.edu /az/databases. Some users find databases to be a little easier to search, and often databases will suggest search terms for you. For example, let's access Academic Search Complete. If we go back to our research question about mental health and social media, and start typing in keywords, you'll notice a drop-down list of possible search terms appears. This already has synonyms listed and can help you build your search. And that is how you find and request articles from Ohio University Libraries. If you have any questions or need assistance locating resources, do not hesitate to reach out to the library. We are always happy to help.