Orillia Instructional Videos

Overview

These instructions will help you find articles in Lakehead's journal article databases.

When performing a search for articles, try more than one database. Different databases (for example JSTOR, Proquest, or Web of Science), contain different collections of journals, so to do a really thorough search, it is necessary to check more than one database.

On the library website, please be aware of the following search options:

Omni Search is the default search. Using this will search the book catalogue, and the article databases, at the same time.

Search it All and Catalogue Search will be discontinued in spring/summer 2020.

E-journal Titles searches journal names only (has nothing to do with finding articles). If you type in the word criminology, you will see a list of any e-journals Lakehead subscribes to that have criminology in the title.

A-Z Databases link lets you do the following very useful things:

• Go directly to a specific database if you know the name of the one you are looking for
• Access the research guides mentioned above
• Access a list of multidisciplinary (or "multi subject") article databases, or other unique sets of databases (i.e. newspapers) using the "Database Types" dropdown on the next page.

Subject Guides (lower on library homepage, and out of sight in the above screen-shot), lets you access the research help pages created for all the subject areas at Lakehead. For example, the Political Science research guide tells you which are the most relevant article databases for poly sci research, as well as other Poly Sci research notes.

Omni Search

While you can enter search keywords in the search-box on the library homepage, you may wish to first navigate to the Advanced Omni search.

• From library homepage click the magnifying glass on the far right side of the search box.
• On next page, click the Advanced Search link.

When searching via the default Omni Search on the library website, you are searching both the book catalogue and the article databases (and numerous other resource types) at the same time. If you are only interested in academic journal articles, on your results page, you will likely want to click the Peer Reviewed Journals link to eliminate all other types of results.

Subject Guides

The Subject Guides give you advice on doing research in the various subject areas at Lakehead University. If looking for journal articles, choose the Find Journal Articles tab on one of the guides, and you will see a list of the most relevant article databases for doing research in that field.

Multidisciplinary Databases

As opposed to being a discipline specific database (like MLA for English Literature, or Sociological Abstracts for Sociology), some databases contain journals from numerous subject areas, and so are considered to be multidisciplinary. Here is a list of the multidisciplinary databases. You can also find this list by selecting A-Z Databases on the library website, going to Databases by Type, and then clicking the Multidisciplinary link.

The example below is ProQuest Search.

The search pictured above uses the search fields on the right side to run a fairly specific search for articles. This search is telling the database the following things.

• Canada is very important to my research. Only show me articles if the word Canada is in the title of the article.
• Additionally, the environment is also a key subject for me. Only show me articles if the word environment is in the abstract (the one-paragraph summary) of the article.
• And finally, I want to see something about the Kyoto summit and protocol from 1997. Only show me articles if the word Kyoto appears somewhere in the full text of the article.

And lastly, please notice that the Full Text, Peer reviewed, and Scholarly journals buttons are all pre-checked for you. This may not always be what you want, but if you run a search with those buttons checked, the database is only going to show you articles which are peer reviewed, and which you can immediately get full access to.

All together, you are saying to the database the following:

• Show me only peer reviewed and full text articles which have the word Canada in the title, the word environment in the abstract, and the word Kyoto somewhere inside the article.