Research Subject Guides
Available from the Lakehead Library homepage, the Subject Guides give you guidance on doing research on all the subject areas at Lakehead University. The Find Journal Articles tab on these guides, tell you what the Key Article Databases are for that subject area. Most often these are subject specific databases that only contain journals from that one subject area.
Searching within a subject specific database generates highly relevant results (they will all be from your subject area), and these databases usually have search tools that allow you to run very focused and precise searches, to retrieve even more relevant results.
OMNI search system - articles
The OMNI Search system can be used to search for academic journal articles. A video demonstrating the use of OMNI for articles can be found on our Help / Contact Us page.
On the OMNI advanced search page you can ask OMNI to only show you articles, via the "Articles" Material Type option shown below on the right side.
Additionally - if you select Articles and More, you are asking OMNI to only show you electronic resources, which includes electronic journal articles and also ebooks and streaming movies. If you leave the search at the default Lakehead Library setting, your results will include all of our print resources (books and government documents etc), and also all of our electronic resources.
When your results come up, you have options for "filtering" the results.
The Personalize button will bring up a list of subject areas, and if you select certain subject areas, results from those areas will float to the top of your list of results.
If you wish to see only Peer Reviewed articles, choose the link on the left.
Multidisciplinary Databases
Lakehead has several databases which are considered multidisciplinary databases - i.e. they contain journals from a wide variety of subject areas, and so contain articles from many subject areas. To access them:
a) Click A-Z Databases on the library homepage.
b) Change the All Databases Types dropdown to Multidisciplinary.
You will see 13 multidisciplinary databases. Most useful are Web of Science, Scholars Portal Journals, ProQuest Search, and JSTOR.
Here's an example of a search:
In this example (above) your limits are:
- articles which have either the phrase "global warming" OR the phrase "climate change" in the abstract (one paragraph summary) of the article.
- articles which have the word shale, OR the word frakking, anywhere within the article.
- articles which are full text, peer reviewed, and were published within the last 3 years.