Databases are searchable collections of information. In this case, scholarly and academic materials such as journal articles and etextbooks. There are many databases you might use depending on the assignment. However, the databases on the 'Best Bets' tab are likely to be the best place for you to focus your search. The 'Recommended' tab suggests other places you might try, particularly if you topic is more interdisciplinary and you are looking for research in disciplines such as health, business and sociology.
SPORTDiscus is the leading bibliographic database for sports and sports medicine research. It includes records from leading sports medicine journals, books, dissertations and more from 1949 to date. Also provides full-text to more than 400 journals listed in the index.
US National Library of Medicine's digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. This databases indexes millions of citations from scholarly health and medical research sources and offers a broad overview of the literature.
Try Europe PMC - an alternative version which indexes the full text source to assist with text mining. Personalised sign in is via one of several services such as ORCiD, Google,etc. For Medical Subject Headings (controlled language indexing), we recommend that you use Medline on Ovid.
Offers access to the Elsevier digital library, covering over 1,800 publications. Most are available in full text after 1995. The collection is updated daily.
APA PsycArticles is a database of full-text articles from just over 120 journals published by the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association, Hogrefe Publishing Group and APA's Educational Publishing Foundation.
Contains full text articles from over 5,800 journals, covering many subjects, including anthropology, politics, political science, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social work. Coverage includes 450 magazines for news, current awareness and examples of professional practice.
Scopus is the largest ever bibliographic database and indexes over 20,000 titles from science, technology, medicine and the social sciences. This abstract only database is updated daily so it is excellent for identifying the emerging research. Use Article Linker (AL - link to full text) to check for full text online sources.
Split your topic into keywords: To find better and fewer results, think about your keywords. Make sure they accurately describe what you are looking for, and add more keywords to make your search more specific.
Think of alternative keywords: For example, 'young' could also be referred to as 'youth' or 'adolescent'. Or, think of the bigger picture. For example, instead of searching for 'boys' or 'girls', try searching for 'gender'.
Search for phrases in "double quotation marks": For example, "special educational needs". This will search for the phrase as a whole, instead of the individual words.
Select a data range: For example, you may only want literature published since 2010. Most databases have the option to select dates.
For more help see our Finding resources guide, or contact your Librarian.