Skip to Main Content
Online Library
NAU Logo

Getting Started with the NAU Online Library Guide

NAU Library resources for all subjects and courses

OneSearch, Smart Searching, E-Books, News, and Websites

Are you required to find "Scholarly Articles," "Peer-Reviewed Articles,"magazines
or "Academic Articles"? If so, these types of articles are:

  • Written and reviewed by scholars and provide new research, analysis, or information about a specific topic.

    • "Review" means the article is approved by other experts before publication

  • Usually focused on a narrow subject or a single case study

  • Intended for an academic audience

OneSearch

OneSearch is an extensive search engine for information in news, articles, and ebooks. Nexis Uni information, however, is not included in OneSearch. Search the Nexis Uni database separately.

Check the box "Full Text" to limit your results to full text articles. Check the box "Peer-reviewed" to limit your results to Peer-reviewed or Scholarly articles. You also may use the limiter tabs at the top of your results page.

Smart Searching Part 1: Tips and Tricks for Finding What You Need Quickly! This interactive tutorial will show you how to find articles, ebooks, and other resources using the OneSearch box.

Databases

These databases contain articles and ebooks on many topics.

Unlike journal articles, scholarly books:

  • Are written on a broader, general subject
  • May contain a collection of related chapters by different authors
  • Contain less recent information

Remember: you may only need to read one chapter of a scholarly book!

How to find ebooks in OneSearch results:

  • At the top of the results page, click on All filters.
  • Click on the arrow by Source type and check eBooks.
  • Click on Apply filters.

How to find ebooks in the NAU Library databases:

In the left column of your search results page:

  • Limit by full text
  • Limit by source type - Books
  • Use the slide to limit by publication date

Avoid using Editorials or Letters to the Editor from print or online newspapers. These articles are "opinion pieces" and the authors may lack subject expertise.

 Image by Luis Estrada from Pixabay

Use these reliable fact-checking and bias-checking websites for news articles and websites:

  • FactCheck.org (politics)

  • Snopes (urban legends, hoaxes, folklore, memes, and rumors)   

  • Climate Feedback (climate change)

  • AFP (choose news, world regions, topics - health, environment, science, politics)   

  • MediaBias/Fact Check (analyzes news and other website bias and contains a list of questionable sources).
     
  • AllSides (reviews how the same news story is covered across the political spectrum - from the left, the center, and the right).

Use the questions on the Questions to Ask When Determining Credibility of Sources handout to help you determine the credibility of websites. Check the information by comparing several websites on the same topic. Take a few facts from one article and confirm or disprove them with another credible source (Stebbins, 2015, pp. 22-23). Use the fact-checking websites on the News tab.

Useful tip: Government and military websites, whose URLs end in .gov, .mil, .state.us, or .state.gov, can be credible sources of information. For more tips about using information from websites, watch the short NAU video below.

Stebbins, L.F. (2015). Finding Reliable Information Online. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Global site tag:
https://national.libguides.com/getting_started_library/finding_information
national.libguides.com
CC-MAIN-2024-26
55183
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TUKDBAJDADYDPI5RXB3HHV5NMFMRDSY2
<urn:uuid:8fd5c710-19b5-459b-82e7-72d6f88f66f3>
2024-06-23T22:02:18Z
3.86.37.148
text/html
sha1:ZB5XMQYP4F3M3MXL3ZAGQZ55U2V7G5UR
<urn:uuid:8a2f41d9-ce08-42b9-93ec-e3cf2c4701f2>
https://national.libguides.com/getting_started_library/finding_information
response
<urn:uuid:6fe95420-ad44-4127-9b68-e8d1226baeb4>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-251
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/