Scholarly Resources vs. Popular Resources
Source: "Study Help: Scholarly Sources Explained" by University of South Australia; https://youtu.be/IRCHdhdS_aU.
Accessed 3/27/2023. License: CC-BY-NC-SA.
Searching Databases
The Lyman Beecher Brooks Library (LBBL) can connect you with hundreds of databases to help you build general knowledge, to perform background research, to connect your with scholarly resources, and even find some entertainment with streaming movies and audio.
Many databases are specific to content type or discipline and will have specific best practices and strategies for getting the best search results. Visit the Library 101 - Advanced Research Techniques guide to learn more.
The complete listing of databases is available on our A-Z Database List.
Note that you may need to authenticate through OpenAthens using your MyNSU login credentials in order to access content.
For more information, visit the following guide How to Access Databases from Off-Campus.
All students, faculty, and staff at NSU have access to FREE subscriptions to the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Sign up for an account to have access to current and archival coverage from some of the world's best news outlets. Please visit the following guide for details: Newspaper Digital Subscriptions for Students, Faculty, and Staff
In addition to the newspaper subscriptions above, the NSU research databases include access to historical newspapers, news aggregators, and business reporting platforms. Try out the following resources or visit the full A-Z database list for more: A-Z Databases
- Factiva
Factiva is a Dow Jones business intelligence platform that includes content from 33,000 news, data, and information sources from 200 countries and 32 languages. The archive has more than two billion articles. The oldest dates from 1944, and 2,300 sources have more than 20 years of archived articles.
- Mergent Online Premium
Mergent Online Premium includes: Mergent Online, Horizon, and Analytics with information on over 35,000 publicly traded companies, 24,000 international public companies and 10,000 extinct (due to merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, etc) global public companies. Company histories and over 200,000 annual reports in PDF, thirty (30) years of stock prices, and more.
- Mintel
Search and browse across thousands of market research intelligence materials including expert reports, consumer survey databooks, industry trends, news, and market observations.
Reports are published regularly across market sectors. They include comprehensive assessment of consumer surveys and link to the interactive databook that the report is based on.
- Historical Newspapers: Norfolk Journal and Guide (ProQuest)
Historical newspaper archive covering 1916 - 2003.
Reference databases are a great place to start your research. These databases include resources that are perfect for background information and broad coverage of topics, such as: encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, and manuals.
Try out some of the reference databases below to get started or visit the full database list here: A-Z Databases
- Britannica Academic
Britannica Academic provides access to high-quality, comprehensive reference information. Includes access to the Britannica encyclopedia, atlas, world data, the Classics, biographies, news, multimedia, and more. You can also use Britannica Academic to search an Internet directory that includes more than 300,000 links to Web sites selected, rated, and reviewed by Britannica editors. This database also includes the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary.
- Credo Reference
Credo Reference provides full-text online access to hundreds of multidisciplinary reference book collections, including art, history, law, medicine, psychology, technology, bilingual dictionaries, and encyclopedias through a one-stop search platform. Search results often include articles from a wide array of publications and frequently present subject coverage from multiple perspectives. Using Credo Reference to approach a topic from different viewpoints can be a great way to expand your familiarity with the topic and it can help you develop new arguments and observations for your research.
- Oxford English Dictionary
A guide for researchers in any discipline to the meaning, history, and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world. As a historical dictionary, the OED is different from dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, sometimes from as far back as the 11th century, and of the language—traced through 3.5 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts, song lyrics, and social media posts.
- Oxford Music Online & Grove Music Online
An online music reference source, offering comprehensive coverage of music, musicians, music-making, and music scholarship. This platform is a powerful resource for music research with over 52,000 articles written by nearly 9,000 scholars charting the diverse history and cultures of music around the globe.
- Oxford Reference Premium
This reference database includes access to almost 400 dictionaries and encyclopedias of fully-indexed, cross-searchable works published by Oxford University Press with detailed information across a broad subject range of topics.
NSU research databases include access to current and historical resources ranging from primary resources to scholarly books and peer-reviewed articles.
Try out some of the research databases below to get started or visit the full database list here: A-Z Databases
Major research platforms that cover multiple disciplines include EBSCOhost and ProQuest:
- Academic Search Complete (EBSCOhost)
Academic Search Complete is a scholarly, multi-disciplinary, full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 12,500 journals and a total of more than 13,200 publications including monographs, reports, and conference proceedings.
- eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
More than 2,000 eBooks offered on a wide variety of subjects and topics, including both fiction and non-fiction titles.
- eBook Central (ProQuest)
eBook Central is a collection of nearly 250,000 academic e-books on a wide variety of subjects.
- ProQuest Platform (ProQuest)
Users can search, find and preview more than 900 million documents and retrieve scholarly full-text open access sources directly curated by ProQuest.
Primary resource databases include items such as original works and digitized historical materials:
- African American Historical Serials Collection (EBSCOhost)
The African American Historical Serials Collection features 173 periodicals spanning from 1816 through 1922. The periodicals in this collection include newspapers and magazines, in addition to reports and annuals from various African American organizations, including churches and educational and service institutions.
- American Poetry (ProQuest)
American Poetry contains over 40,000 poems by more than 200 poets, covering the Colonial period to the early twentieth century, and drawn from over 1,200 printed sources. A full list of titles is available for download beneath the search box.
- Gale Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History Since 1940, Parts I, II, III
The Archives of Sexuality and Gender program provides a robust and significant collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. With material dating back to the sixteenth century, researchers and scholars can examine how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, erotica, and many other topical areas.
The library offers a wide variety of audio / visual databases from instructional lab videos to popular movies and jazz music.
Try out some of the audio / visual databases below to get started or visit the full database list here: A-Z Databases
- Academic Video Online (AVON)
Academic Video Online delivers video titles spanning a wide range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.
- Feature Films for Education (Infobase)
Infobase Feature films for Education Collection has almost 800 full-length titles. This collection focuses on both current and hard-to-find titles, including dramas, literary adaptations, blockbusters, classics, science fiction, environmental titles, foreign films, social issues, animation studies, Academy Award® winners, and more.
- JoVE Science Education
The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), a peer reviewed scientific video journal, is dedicated to teaching the practice and theory of scientific experiments through engaging and easy-to-understand visual demonstrations. All JoVE articles are indexed in subject-relevant indexing sites, including PubMed/MEDLINE, SciFinder and Scopus.
- Kanopy
Kanopy is a video streaming collection with over 26,000 films ranging from documentaries, indie, foreign, classic and blockbuster movies in several subjects and sub-subject areas. PBS, New Day Films, Kino Lorber, and California NewsReel are just a few of the content providers.
- Naxos Music Library
Naxos Music Library (NML) offers streaming access to more than 177,230 CDs of both standard and rare repertoire. Over 600 new titles are being added to the library each month.
JSTOR
- JSTOR
A multidisciplinary digital library that includes all 2,800+ academic journals on JSTOR; spanning more than 60 disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Access also includes more than two million primary source documents.
And, with the incorporation of Artstor's collections, JSTOR is now home to more than two million images.
Running a basic search in JSTOR is similar to searching in Wikipedia. You can use general keywords and phrases in your search and JSTOR will return results across its full collection that include some or all of your keywords.
On the results page, the left-side menu can be used to filter your results. Check the "Content I can Access" button to access full-text articles.
Clicking the "Advanced Search" button above the search box opens an new page with additional options to control what kinds of results your search will return.
Use the provided Advanced Search fields, dropdown menus, and material types boxes to refine your search.
JSTOR also provides a Search Help page that provides specific overview of the advanced tools available on the platform. Examples include using Boolean Operators, Truncation, Wildcards, and Proximity searching.
In addition to standard database searching, JSTOR includes several tools that can be used for exploring your topic, discovering resources, and extracting data from the JSTOR collection. Each of these resources can be found in the Tools menu in the upper-right portion of any search page.
- The JSTOR Understanding series:
- The JSTOR Understanding series presents primary resources with passages highlighted to indicate resources in JSTOR that have quoted the passage and provides links to those articles. This tool can be used to explore the scholarly interpretation of primary works, brainstorm topics, and learn about primary resources.
- Data for Research:
- The Data for Research tool uses Constellate, a JSTOR Labs project, to provide text analysis and text mining access to the JSTOR collection that can be used to create datasets such as term frequency over time and prevalence within a subject.
- This resource also provides built in visualization tools for your data set.
JSTOR offers a full LibGuides site of research guides to help researchers make the most of the platform. These assistance tools can be found in the page footer of any page by clicking the "LibGuides" or "Research Basics" links.
- Recommended guides include the following: