If you have a citation, here are some tips on getting your hands on that coveted article, book or chapter.
The Hamilton Library Catalog is the best starting place to find print and electronic books that are immediately available to you. You can find a search box for the catalog at the top of the LITS home page. The catalog includes a lot more than books, so you will want to refine your results using the options on the right side of the results screen. Choose "Books" from the drop-down menu under "Resource Type" to see all our titles. We now have more electronic books than print books.
Use WorldCat if you want to start out searching for books at other libraries.
You can search for articles in the Hamilton Library Catalog or in a multi-disciplinary database like Academic Search Premier. There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, however, you may find it is more efficient to limit your search to scholarly articles in a specific area of study. You can get to these by selecting the "Guides" link on the LITS home page and navigating to Subject & Course Guides. There is a guide for each of the areas of study offered by Hamilton, and each of these starts off with a "We Suggest" section highlighting the most important databases in that discipline.
While you are on the Guides page, check out the dozens of other guides to help you discover and incorporate additional resources your need into your projects.
Nearly every database you use to search for articles, books, and images contain item records that include subject headings. Below is an example from the Hamilton Library Catalog.
Subject headings are words or phrases used by a database to tag similar books, articles, etc. These subject terms are constructed using a controlled vocabulary that is unique to that databases. In the example above, "United States -- History -- Revolution, 1785-1783" is used to tag any book about the American Revolution. Other databases may use different terms to describe the same topic or concept. For example, America: History & Life, which indexes scholarly journals concerned with U.S. history uses the term "american revolutionary war, 1775-1783" to tag articles about the American Revolution.
You can use subject headings to both expand and focus your search. Selecting a subject heading in an item record can expand your search by presenting you with a list of books/articles on the same topic. It can also focus your search by eliminating books/articles that are only tangentially related to what you want to find.
A key to your success in searching most databases is making sure your keywords match words found in the database's subject headings. You can do this by:
For example, suppose you were searching PsycInfo for scholarly articles on the impact of sleep deprivation on the grades of university students. You might start with the following search:
After looking at the subject terms used in PsycInfo, you might change your search to the following:
By replacing your original keyword search with a revised subject search, you have both expanded the number of articles on your topic (imagine how many relevant articles might not have included the word "grades") and excluded a significant number of irrelevant articles (by going from 496 results to 71 results).
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