Database Search Tips
e.g. rights AND women
workers AND globalization
OR requires any of the specified words to appear in each document
e.g. "human rights" OR "civil liberties"
Indian* OR aboriginal* OR native* OR indigenous OR First Nation*
NOT excludes terms not desired
e.g. health rights NOT reproductive
Combining ideas
e.g. women AND (human rights OR civil liberties)
Canad* AND (human rights or civil liberties) AND (Indian* OR aboriginal* OR first nation*OR native* OR indigenous)
- prioritize your concepts to begin your search with the most important one
- consider additional concepts to use, if necessary, to reduce or expand retrieval
- if the database has a thesaurus, either online or print, check for suggested terms
Databases
- Criminal Justice Abstracts with full textCriminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text is the full-text counterpart of Criminal Justice Abstracts, formerly a SAGE database. This resource includes bibliographic records and full text covering essential areas related to criminal justice and criminology. The increasing globalization of criminology is reflected in Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text coverage of hundreds of journals from around the world. This resource includes full text for more than 200 magazines and journals as well as full text books & monographs.
- Worldwide Political Science AbstractsThe Worldwide Political Science Abstracts provides abstracts and indexing of the international literature of political science and international relations, along with complementary fields, including international law and public administration/policy. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,500+ serials publications and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers.
- Sociological AbstractsAn index to journal articles, conference papers, books and book chapters, dissertations and book and other media reviews. Subject areas: sociology, cultural anthropology, criminal justice, social work, social psychology, urban and rural development, demography, gerontology, family studies, and ethnic and minority studies.
- Quicklaw (Lexis Advance Quicklaw)Quicklaw is a Canadian online legal information system that provides full text of Canadian and foreign case law, federal and provincial legislation and regulations, case reports, digests, tribunal decisions, and statutes, as well as secondary materials such as law journals and newsletters.
- Social Services AbstractsSocial work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, and community development; abstracts and indexes over 1,400 serial publications and includes abstracts of journal articles and dissertations, and citations to book reviews.
- Nexis UniNexis Uni replaced Lexis Nexis Academic.
Contains information from over 15,000 news, legal and business sources. Comprehensive coverage of news and current events, government, business, medical, and legal topics, as well as general reference information is included. Formats found in the database are: international and domestic newspapers, magazines and trade journals, broadcast transcripts (NPR, ABC News, CBS News, and CNN), company financial information, industry and market news, case law, law reviews, medical news and abstracts, and country profiles. Includes business information on over 80 million public & private international companies and 75 million executives. Non-English language news sources are available in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch. Campus news from some 400 college/university papers and over 50 wire services are also available.
Newspapers and Periodical Resources
Newspapers and periodical resources are an excellent way to more strongly connect real life situations to scholarly literature. The following resources will get you started researching the major (and minor) Canadian periodical resources.
- Canadian Major DailiesThe full text database includes national and leading regional papers such as National Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal,Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Regina Leader Post, Vancouver Sun, and the Victoria Times-Colonist.
- CPIQ Canadian Periodicals (Gale OneFile)An index to Canadian periodicals (English and French), plus full text for some publications; also includes selected sections of The Globe and Mail.
- CBCA Canadian Business & Current Affairs DatabaseThe Canadian Business & Current Affairs™ Database combines full text and indexed content from all four subsets (Business, Current Events, Education, and Reference). The content comes from a broad range of Canadian sources, with the majority of content in English and hundreds of thousands of full-text articles in French. The resource includes millions of full-text articles and records from 1933 to current, providing content in Canadian current events, business, science and technology, medical, humanities and the arts, and hundreds of topics.
Having Problems?
Not finding enough material?
- if you have combined several concepts using
- look at each concept and see if you can think of additional synonyms (use OR)
- if you are searching free-text, look at your terms carefully and think of ways to broaden your phrasing
Finding too much material?
- look at a sample of the items retrieved; if a high proportion is not relevant, add another concept
- sometimes irrelevant records may be eliminated by NOTing out a particular aspect or population
- try limiting by language, date, form of material, particular field instead of free-text