Education *: Finding Research Materials

When using article databases, remember there are always three stages in your workflow:

1) Discovery: Do (and redo!) your searching, using varying terms and combining using the Boolean operators "and, or, not" to get good results. Your first search is not your best search, but rather an opportunity to learn how to immediately do a better search.

2) Delivery: For items that you like, select the link to the full-text if available, or click on the button to see if we own the item. If you want to keep this item, either save it to your own computer, email it to yourself, or print it.

3) Organize it: Keep the "meta-information" about all the resources you found for your records and to make your bibliographies. You will find yourself returning to resources so having a system in place will save you time and aggravation later. USC Libraries has a subscription to the citation manager, RefWorks, that will help you organize the information you're collecting. For more information on other citation managers, check out this page.

Content in this guide has been adapted with permission from Scott Collard's NYU Libraries Education guide.

The article databases listed below allow you to search for articles through multiple journals simultaneously. Click on the name of the database below to start searching. If you're off-campus, you'll be asked to log-in using your USC ID and password. For a list of all USC Libraries subscription databases, go to A-Z Database List.

If the library does not have the book you need, you can request it through interlibrary loan or recommend we add it to the library's collection.