1. Basic Database Search Guide Part A
Centennial College Libraries RS

2. Always read your assignment carefully before you begin to do research.
My research question is Identify and explore human rights issues in Canada and I want to look for articles.

3. Go to the library website library.centennialcollege.ca
Follow this basic search of one of our most popular databases – Academic Search Premier – to learn how to search for articles.
It is a multidisciplinary database and good to use for all subjects that you are researching.

4. Click on the Articles &
E-Resources tab
Click on the drop-down arrow to select a subject area of databases to search

5. Choose a database to search
This example shows the databases that are good to use when you are researching Diversity subjects
Choose a database to search
Read the database descriptions to find the best one to use for your research subject
Select Academic Search Premier for this search

6. Or Click on View All E-Resources A-Z

7. And choose Academic Search Premier

8. When you are off campus you will need to login with your student number and your PIN - the last 4 numbers of your student number

9. Type in your keywords as a boolean search: human rights AND Canada
using the search boxes provided
Set your limits to
Full Text and Scholarly if that’s what you want
If you want newspaper and magazine articles as well as journal articles, leave the scholarly limit off

10. Look at the subject thesaurus to see if your keyword is used as a subject in this database

11. Do your search again and change the search field to subject term
The results will be more specific since the subject term - Human rights - has been assigned to each of the articles that has been retrieved
The total number of results has gone from 465 to 250

12. You can see that the subject term has been assigned to this article instead of it just being a keyword phrase in the article

13. Read the abstract or summary of your article to see if you want to send it to yourself

14. You can refine your search by changing the field to a Geographic Term
You can add an article to the folder view from this screen

15. You can also place your cursor here to see the abstract

16. Refine the search further by changing the date range of your results
Move the slider along to the desired date and click on Update Results

17. Or put this article into a folder to email with others
You can this article
Export this article to RefWorks
Print this article

18. Click on the folder view to email your articles to yourself

19. Select the articles that you want to send to yourself, then click on the envelope icon

20. Select the citation format that you want to use for your reference, type in your address, and send the articles to yourself

21. That’s it for a basic search
That’s it for a basic search. If you would like to go a bit further and learn more about what you can do in this database, please continue.

22. Basic Database Search Guide Part B

23. Before you begin to search, click on choose databases to add other databases to your search if you want to search more than one database on EBSCOhost

24. I do that by clicking on the box beside the database name
The topic that I am searching for is human rights in Canada and I want to add two other databases
I do that by clicking on the box beside the database name
Then click OK

25. Now I am searching three databases on EBSCOhost

26. This time try your search without selecting the Full Text limit

27. You will see results like this when you don’t select Full Text
Search for Article may take you to other databases where you can find the full text of the article, or let you know that you can find the article in our print holdings, or give you a sorry message if the article isn’t available. If you see a sorry message and you want the article, let us know and we can order it for you.

28. This article is available full-text in all of these databases.
Click on the Article link to open it

29. Once you have done your search, reviewed your articles, selected the ones that you want, and added them to a folder, remember that you can the articles to yourself in a specific citation style, e.g. APA

30. Or you could export your citation to RefWorks

31. RefWorks is a bibliographic software package that will help you to create your reference lists and in-text citations
There’s a tutorial on the library website that will teach you how to use RefWorks

32. Go to the APA Style guide

33. Click on RefWorks

34. Do the tutorial and create an account

35. Good luck with your search! C
Ask us for help whenever you need it.