Quicksearch is a discovery tool that works a little like Google, except that instead of searching the entirety of the Internet, Quicksearch searches Yale University Library's holdings. This includes books, journal articles, newspaper articles, digital collections, data sets, and much more. Search by title, author, or keyword. The tutorials below will walk you through finding articles and e-books using Quicksearch.
For more precise searching, or subject-specific searches, you might want to try Yale's databases to find scholarly journal articles. The following are just a few of the many databases Yale subscribes to.
Keywords or key phrases are the essential elements of your research question. They're what you'll use when you search in Yale University Library databases. For example, if I'm studying biodiversity conservation in the Amazon rainforest, my keywords are going to be biodiversity conservation and Amazon rainforest.
The AND is important! AND is a Boolean operator, which is a word that's used to create relationships between keywords. When I search for biodiversity conservation AND Amazon rainforest, I'm telling the database that I need articles that contain BOTH terms. Other Boolean operators include OR (useful for terms that are roughly synonymous, like global warming OR climate change) and NOT (useful for eliminating terms that you don't want in your search results).
For a short database walk-through of one of Yale University Library's research databases, try this tutorial.
Books don't go through the same peer review process as academic journal articles, but they're still considered scholarly resources. (Though many books are compilations of academic journal articles on a similar theme.) Because books are broader in scope than journal articles, they're often a good place to look for background on a particular topic, and a great place to start your research.
Search for books (both print and electronic) in Orbis (Yale University Catalog) or Quicksearch/Books+
When searching in Books+, you can easily limit your search to ebooks by selecting the Online Results option at the top of your search results:
Google - particularly Google Scholar - can be a great tool when you're just starting your research and are looking to get a sense of the vocabulary of your topic and the most prominent voices in the literature. The trouble with Google is that it's often unwieldy (you're searching the entirety of the Internet, not just a curated collection) and misleading (not everything that Google flags as scholarly is actually scholarly or properly vetted).
For information on how to make Google work for you, see Gwyneth Crowley and Kayleigh Bohémier's Google for Research guide.
While there's a lot of good information available through the Web, there's a lot of misinformation out there as well! Here are some questions you should apply to what you find:
(This is known as the CRAAP - currency, authority, accuracy, purpose - Test.)
Many short (under four-minutes) tutorials are available through Yale Library's YouTube Channel.
@YALELIBRARY
© 2022 Yale University Library • All Rights Reserved