Finding really reliable relevant resources

Lee Fallin

As a university student, it is important to search for articles and other resources in the right place. Luckily for you, as a student of the University of Hull, you get access to lots of amazing resources via the University Library. This #NoFrillsSkills post will briefly introduce you to our amazing subject-specific resources and our guide on how to perform an academic search.

Finding academic resources in your subject area

Google, Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search are often too generic, may contain non-scholarly resources and miss a lot of content we buy as a library! To help you with this, the library provides access to a whole range of disciplinary and multi-disciplinary databases. These databases search packages of journals, books and other resources in specific areas of research, helping you target your search to the right kind of material. While these may sound daunting, they are actually very easy to use and you will get a much higher quality set of search results.

A screenshot from Google Scholar with a red cross through it. This is to symbolise NOT using Google Scholar for academic searching

As we subscribe to lots of disciplinary and multi-disciplinary databases, we’ve developed our Subject Library Guides (LibGuides) to help you find the right one(s) for your own searches. There are over 40 guides available, covering every major area of teaching and research at the university. The guides include everything you need to get started with finding material in your subject area. You’ll find the specific databases for your subject area on the ‘Articles & Journals’ tab of the appropriate guide:

A screenshot showing the articles and jorunals tab on a Subject Libguide. You can find this by navigating to one of the Subject LibGuides and following the link to 'Articles and Journals'

 

How to search like a librarian

It’s not just about where you search, but what you search. Searching for literature is often something a lot of people feel confident with, but actually, most of us can improve this skill. If you are ever searching for articles and your results number into thousands, you may not be choosing the best search terms. Putting more thought into what you are searching for and reducing the number of results really saves you time by discarding irrelevant sources. We have an excellent guide on planning a search strategy if you want to improve.

 

* Okay. Google Scholar has its uses – but it should never be the first place you search. Always start with your Subject Library Guides