Source: "Study Help: Scholarly Sources Explained" by University of South Australia; https://youtu.be/IRCHdhdS_aU. Accessed 3/27/2023
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
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.
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.
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 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.
More than 2,000 eBooks offered on a wide variety of subjects and topics, including both fiction and non-fiction titles.
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:
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 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.
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 delivers video titles spanning a wide range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.
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.
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.
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.
This sociology research database features more than 2.1 million records with subject headings from a 20,000+ term sociological thesaurus. Contains full-text for more than 860 journals dating back to 1908. This database also includes full-text for more than 830 books and monographs, and full-text for over 16,800 conference papers.
SocINDEX with Full Text 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 below the search boxes. Either way, SocINDEX with Full Text 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.
The "Advanced Search" option is the default and preferred method of using the EBSCOhost platform search.
Use the provided Advanced Search search boxes to build your search and refine it by assigning values to the "Select a field" dropdown menu at the end of each search box.
Below the search boxes, there are a variety of Search options that can be used to narrow results by language, publication date, and many more. This section is also where you will find the "Peer Reviewed" checkbox to limit your results to only scholarly resources.
For detailed explanations of every field in the Advanced Search feature, review the instructions in the user manual that can be accessed from the "Help" link in the upper-right corner of any page.
SocINDEX with Full Text and other EBSCOhost databases offer several specific filtering and time-saving features.
EBSCOhost offers a full user manual that can be accessed through the "Help" button in the upper right corner of any page. Additionally, anywhere that you see a "?" symbol at the end of a line, you can click that button for support on that specific topic.