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Undergraduate Research Scholar Program: Finding Articles & More

Tips on secondary research

Off-Campus Access to Databases

To access any database in this Research Guide from off campus, you will need your myMCC login. If you need to reset your password, go to the myMCC login page and click on Password Reset/Find Username.

Recommended Databases for Scholarly Journals

The following databases contain scholarly journal articles in many subject areas.

More Databases

For access to more databases, including those that focus on a particular subject area, try the following links.

Research Reports and Government Documents

Depending on your topic, there might be excellent material available on the free web, such as research reports developed by government agencies and professional organizations.  Carefully evaluate resources found on the web to make sure they come from credible authorities.

What if I can't find the full-text of an article?

Sometimes you may find a good-sounding article that only gives the citation and abstract, but not the full article.  The links below may help you find the full-text of journal articles.  If the full-text is not available, you can order the article through interlibrary loan by bringing the citation to the Library Circulation Desk.  It can take a week or two to obtain material via interlibrary loan.

Quick Tips and Shortcuts for Database Searching (video 5:19)

Sample Database Searches

(parasitism OR parasitic or parasites) AND (dragonfly OR dragonflies)

"physiological stress" AND staphylococcus aureus

(mrsa OR staphylococcus aureus) AND (ultraviolet light OR ph stress)

(staphylococcus OR mrsa) AND nasal carriage AND (equine OR horse)

Some Advanced Searching Tips

Field Searching:  The advanced search screen of many databases allows you to specify where in the record your search terms will be found.  The Academic Search Complete database will search for your terms in the citation and abstract unless you change the field to all text.  Then it will search for your terms in the entire text of the article, often resulting in more articles found.  ProQuest, on the other hand, automatically searches for your terms in the full text unless you change the field to something else.

Following the Citation Trail:  If you find a good article on your topic, look through the references at the end of that article for more articles on that topic.  You can then search for those articles specifically or order them through interlibrary loan.

Subject Headings:  When you find a good article in a database, look at the subect headings associated with the article for additional search terms.

 

Research Tip: Boolean Searching
https://libguides.mchenry.edu/scholars/articles
libguides.mchenry.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-27
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application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DPKO6SCMCG2NYLZAULAEITMKVPXSLOVQ
<urn:uuid:d4d02d15-a74f-4236-833d-29a585955948>
2022-07-03T01:50:47Z
54.88.35.99
text/html
sha1:XTW3ZYVTFD4P4VHZS6YRYEQHPULTTP7L
<urn:uuid:a4f8c090-e535-45c9-86b9-88460f97089b>
https://libguides.mchenry.edu/scholars/articles
response
<urn:uuid:9350e447-4557-439c-a12d-dac6de25e14d>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-27
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June/July 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-143
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-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/