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 4.0
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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:
This scholarly, multi-disciplinary, full-text database includes more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals with coverage across nearly all areas of academic study. In addition to its 8,500 full-text periodicals, the database features more than 75,000 videos from the Associated Press from 1930 to the present.
More than 2,000 eBooks offered on a wide variety of subjects and topics, including both fiction and non-fiction titles.
eBook Central is a collection of nearly 250,000 academic e-books on a wide variety of subjects.
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:
This collection features 173 periodicals spanning from 1829 through 1922. In addition to newspapers and magazines, the texts include reports and annuals from various African American organizations, including churches and educational and service institutions.
This collection contains over 40,000 poems from the Colonial period through to the early-twentieth century. This collection features major canonical poets, important literary groups, such as the Transcendentalists and the Knickerbocker school, and substantial bodies of work by less familiar names such as Elizabeth Akers Allen, Richard Emmons, Lemuel Hopkins and Emma Lazarus. A full list of titles is available for download beneath the search box.
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
This multidisciplinary video database supports researchers in many different fields, from anthropology to zoology. The collection's wide range of academic material includes documentaries, interviews, feature films, performances, news programs and newsreels, and demonstrations.
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.
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 (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.
A comprehensive bibliography of writings about music featuring citations, abstracts, and indexes. It covers over one million publications from the early 19th century to the present on traditional music, popular music, classical music, and related subjects, enhanced with the full text of more than 200 periodicals.
Academic Search Complete is part of the EBSCOhost platform. By default, this platform will open on the Advanced Search screen. You can enter general keywords and phrases in the top search box or switch to Basic Search by clicking the "Basic Search" link located to the right side of your screen, over the field dropdown menus. Either way, Academic Search Complete will return results across its full collection that include some or all of your keywords.
Many of the EBSCOhost databases available at Norfolk State University search huge volumes of resources and using the Advanced Search to narrow your results is often advised. See the Advanced Search tab of this block for more information.
Basic Search Screen
The basic search allows you to filter for articles with full text available, articles that are peer reviewed, and to narrow down the timeframe you are searching to the past year, the past five years, or the past 10 years.
When you enter your search terms in the box, the database will give you suggestions for possible search terms. You can select one of the suggestions by clicking on it, or continue with your own keywords.
The results quickly let you know if it is peer reviewed with a yellow seal and the words, "Peer reviewed | Academic Journal"
The "Advanced Search" option is the default and preferred method of using the EBSCOhost platform search. You can switch back to the Basic Search by clicking on the "Basic search" link located above the field dropdown menus.
Use the provided Advanced Search search boxes to build your search and refine it by assigning values to the "All fields" dropdown menu at the end of each search box.
Below the search boxes, there are a four tabs that allow you to refine your searches via filters, search modes, publication name, and subjects.
Filters
The "Filters" tab allows you to limit your results to articles that have abstracts available, are collected works, are full text, are main records, are review records, are peer reviewed, where they were published or produced, the name of the publication and the date of the publication.
In addition, you can narrow down the document type, the language of the item, and the subject major heading.
Search Options
These options allow you to select your search mode. Learn more about these types of searching at EBSCO's Applying Search Modes
Publications
On this tab you can search a particular publication. Click the box next to the title, then the "Add to search" button. You can add multiple journals at once.
Subjects
The last tab lets you search by subject. This is especially helpful if your search terms can mean different things to different fields. For example, a search for the programming language "Python" is different from a search for the animal "python". By narrowing down the subject, you can exclude references to the animal. Click the box next to the subject or subjects you want and click the "Add to search button".
EBSCOhost databases offer several specific filtering and time-saving features.
MyEBSCO Sign In:
If you want to save documents to your account, sign in to MyEBSCO first. This will ensure that your items are saved and will be accessible the next time that you access any EBSCOhost database.
To access your account click the "MyEBSCO" link located at the top right of any page and then the "Sign in to MyEBSCO" button to enter your personalized workspace where you can save your resources to Project Folders and even share folders with a group.
If it's your first time signing in, click the "Continue personalized" button.
Because your EBSCOhost account works across the full platform, your folders are available any EBSCOhost database.
After signing in to MyEBSCO you have access to: projects, saved, recent activity, and alerts. You can learn more about these options on the My Database tab.
Dynamic filtering
In the search results page, the "All filters" button located below the search box will allow you to add, remove, or adjust any filters on your search.
Mix-and-Match Databases:
The EBSCOhost platform includes many databases and you can search across any or all of them simultaneously by selecting the databases that you want to search from the full database list. From the top of the search page, click the link after "Searching:" and a pop-up will the full list of EBSCOhost databases will appear.
Check or un-check the boxes for databases that you want to search and click the "Select" button. Now when you search, you will be searching all of your selected databases at once.
Note that when you mix databases, you may lose some of the filtering options that you are used to seeing in an individual search on the results page. If necessary, rerun your search in single databases as needed.
My Dashboard offers several ways to save and share your research. Review the features listed below and use the links below to jump between sections:
If you want to save documents to your account, sign in to MyEBSCO first. This will ensure that your items are saved and will be accessible the next time that you access any EBSCOhost database.
To access your account click the "MyEBSCO" link located at the top right of any page and then the "Sign in to MyEBSCO" button to enter your personalized workspace where you can save your resources to Project Folders and even share folders with a group.
If it's your first time signing in, click the "Continue personalized" button.
Because your EBSCOhost account works across the full platform, your folders are available any EBSCOhost database.
After signing in to MyEBSCO you have access to: projects, saved, recent activity, and alerts.
To create a new project, click on the round + button to the right of your screen.
Give it a name, an optional due date and an optional description, and click the "Create" button.
Your new project will appear on the Projects screen. You can have multiple projects at the same time.
Articles
You can save articles without placing them in a project. Click on the bookmark icon located to the right of any article listing to add it to your saved list. You can save from the Listing results or the item page.
The article now appears in the Saved list, under the Records tab. You can remove the article by clicking the bookmark icon again.
Searches
You can also save searches for later reference. Perform your search then click on the three dots button located at the top right of the search results. Click "Save search".
A pop-up window will appear. Enter any additional information and click the "Save" button.
It will now appear in the Saved section of My dashboard under the Searches tab. You can remove the search by clicking the bookmark icon labeled "Save".
When you are logged into MyEBSCO, your search history and any items you have viewed on the EBSCOhost platform are saved for 24 hours under the Recent Activity page.
Holds & Checkouts
This is not an active tab.
Journal Alerts
You can add alerts to your account to notify you when a specific journal adds issues or articles.
To set an alert for a journal, click on the "Publications" tab in on the Advanced Search page. Search for the journal title you are interested in. Click on the three dots menu to the right of the journal title for the publication tools and click, "Create Alert".
This will open a pop-up window that ask your preferences on notifications. Enter the required information and click on the "Create alert" button at the bottom of the page.
The alert will now appear on the Alert page in your My dashboard. You can remove the alert by clicking on the three dots menu and selecting "delete".
Search Alerts
You can set up alerts for your searches and be notified when new records have been added matching your parameters. This is useful for long term research projects or research of personal interest.
Run your search. Then click on the three dots menu located to the right at the top of the results list and select "Create alert".
This will open a pop-up window. Input any additional details on the search and your notification preferences. Click on the "Create alert" button at the bottom of the page.
Your search will now appear on the Alerts page under the "Search alerts" tab. You can remove the alert by clicking on the three dots menu and selecting "delete".
EBSCOhost offers a full user manual on their Help page. You can access the manual using the Help button located under "Research Tools" in the left hand menu.