Transcript of 'Searching in a Database'
Downloadable version: Transcript of 'Searching in a Database'
Hello. In this video, you'll learn how to search within a database. Start from the library homepage, library.ubc.ca.Select the indexes and databases tab. We're going to start with a title search for a know database.
Enter "Academic Search Premier." This is a broad, interdisciplinary database that's good for searching in multiple subject areas. On the results page, select Academic Search Premier.
This is Academic Search Premier. You'll see three search boxes at the top, connected by AND. Let's try a search for Teenagers AND Facebook AND "mental health". You can either enter your whole search in the top bar, or enter all of your terms in the separate boxes, using AND to connect them.
Clicking search will bring you to the Academic Search Premier results page. You can further limit your results using the limiters on the left hand side, under "refine results." Let's choose scholarly peer-reviewed journals and academic journals to limit to academic sources. Other useful filters include date, subject, and geography.
Clicking an article title will bring you to a page with the full bibiographic information about the paper, as well as, often, a short abstract. The abstract is a quick summary of the content of the paper, so using the title and the abstract, you can evaluate whether you want to invest more time in reading the full paper.
Not all papers you find in academic search premier are available in full text from the database. Click the yellow UBC elink to search for the item in the library's collection to see if we have it from another source. From there, click full text online to access the article.
Now you know how to perform basic searches in a database. See the next video in this module to learn how to perform more advanced searching techniques in databases.