Thank you for doing this exercise.

• Using quotation marks and adding keywords using AND narrows your search.

• The first article in your results list may have the keyword(s) you searched, but may not be on topic. Be sure to read the abstract and, if necessary, scan the full text of the article. Articles are listed by date. You may have to scroll through a page or 2 before finding relevant articles.

• Use truncation to find alternate endings of search terms. Be careful not to truncate terms too early. For example, if you truncated “salaries” as sal*, you would get articles with the term “salaries” but also articles with the terms sales, salutations, etc.

• Brainstorm synonyms and related terms to expand your search. Use the Subjects and/or Thesaurus in the database, too. The terms the database uses may not be the terms we think of in our heads.

• Checking the scholarly/peer-reviewed limit will limit your results to articles from scholarly journals. But, not all articles from scholarly journals are appropriate for your research paper. For example, many journals contain book reviews, letters to the editor and short summaries of previous research. Book reviews and letters to the editor will not be accepted on the bibliography assignment.

• Once you find an article from a scholarly/peer-reviewed journal, you still have to do an evaluation. You still have to explain the accuracy, reliability, authority, etc of the article. A sentence such as “I know this source is reliable because it’s from a scholarly journal” will not be accepted on the bibliography assignment.