Finding Scholarly Sources in Library Databases
For finding information about instructional strategies for your disability of focus, I recommend using Academic Search Complete. Academic Search Complete is our biggest, most comprehensive database. It's a great place to start looking for more detailed information about your topic, after you've already found some background information.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
(EBSCO) A scholarly multi-disciplinary database that provides full text, indexing, and abstracts, videos and images from journals, magazines and newspapers. Full text of articles from 6500+ journals, magazines and newspapers, plus image collections.
You'll find scholarly and popular sources in Academic Search Complete.
You can use the Source Type menu to limit your search results to either type (see video 5 in our ASC playlist for help) or look at the icons next to each search result.
- Scholarly sources will have an Academic Journal icon:
- Popular sources will have either a Periodicals icon (for magazines or trade publications) or a News icon (for newspaper articles):
- You may also see some results with a Review icon. Reviews may come from scholarly or popular publications, but they're not the most helpful research sources (they typically review new books on a topic - librarians use them to buy books for the library). Try not to use sources with the Review icon:
Before you search Academic Search Complete, take a look at our YouTube playlist on using the database. It breaks down most aspects of the database, from how to type in your search terms to limiting searches to scholarly sources to using auto-generated MLA citations.
Other Recommended Databases
- Nursing & Allied Health This link opens in a new window
(ProQuest) This database offers reliable, comprehensive coverage of the fields of nursing and allied health including journals, video, dissertations, reference books and more.
