When you are searching a database, you have to speak the language of the database. To do that you have to take keywords from your thesis statement. For example:
Thesis Statement: Exercise improves health in the elderly.
From the above thesis statement, you can determine that your keywords will be exercise, health, and elderly.
It is important to remember that databases might not use these exact words. Find synonyms with a thesaurus to come up with similar keywords to search.
For example, in relation to the above thesis statement, you could also use the keywords physical activity, fitness, well-being, and aging adults.
Check out the following resource for more details:
UC Merced’s “Selecting & Using Keywords” tutorial helps students identify main concepts in their research questions, brainstorm related terms, and build effective search strategies for databases and other research tools.
Click the Boolean Operators tab to learn how to create a search phrase with these keywords.
In a database, go to the advanced search tab to see "limiters". Limiters "limit" your search or narrow your search to the most relevant results.
Types of limiters include:
For more information on how to search a database, check out the following resources:
Boolean Operators are the words "AND", "OR", and "NOT". These words are placed in between your keywords to narrow or broaden your search.
If you search exercise AND elderly, all your search results will contain BOTH of these keywords.
If you search exercise OR elderly, your results will have either the word elderly, exercise, or both terms. This is used to broaden your search.
If you search exercise NOT elderly, all your results will just contain exercise, so any results with both words will not appear.
| Popular Sources | Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Sources | |
| Author | Professional writers, journalists, or members of the general public. | Experts (scientists, professors, scholars) in a particular field. |
| Audience | General Public | Other experts in a particular field. |
| Language | Basic and clear - easily understood | Very technical and scholarly - not easily understood. |
| Purpose | Often published by for-profit companies for revenue and profit. | Published by non-profit or education organizations to communicate new ideas. |
| Characteristics | Tend to be short and on topics of general interest. | Tend to be longer and are on very specific topics. |
| Citations | Informal or no citations for sources. | Complete and formal citations for sources. |
| Review Process | Reviewed by an editor or self-published with no formal review process. | Often reviewed by a panel of scholars in the field being studied. (Peer-Reviewed) |
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