Fall 2022 - ENGL 101 Cumulative Final Project - Prof. Stewart

When you do research for an assignment, you will think about the types of sources you need to support your topic. While the internet has many sources you can use, research assignments may require more academic or scholarly sources. Academic sources are written by instructors, other researchers, professors, and experts in that field. They usually have more complicated language and provide references or other sources they use to support their topic in the form of citations. Academic sources can most easily be found in library databases than on the internet.

You can find academic databases on the GCC Library website by:

1. Go to the GCC Library website.
2. Under Research Help, select "Databases A-Z".
3. Find the suggested databases for your assignment.

Databases to Use for Articles, Contextualized Documents, and Media

If you want to find articles in library databases, you need to search with keywords or search terms. Keywords are the main ideas of your research topic.

Research Topic Example:

I want to find resources on the effects of divorce on the stress level of children in the United States,

From my topic, I need to look at WHAT is important, WHO I'm talking about, and WHERE is it happening.

My keywords can be: WHO: children of divorce; WHAT: stress; and WHERE: United States

Note: We can put children of divorce and Unites States in quotation marks to search them as phrases.

Example Search in the ProQuest Database:

1. On the library webpage, click on A-Z databases.
2. Find the ProQuest database on the left side of the page under "Recommended Databases", or by clicking on the "P" letter.
3. In the advanced search page of ProQuest, enter your keywords in the search box, in my example children of divorce, stress, and United States. Use AND to connect these ideas and find them together, or you can type each term in one box and add more boxes if you need. Put children of divorce and United States in quotation marks to search them as phrases. You can also check the full-text option and modify the date to get the full-text articles from the last five years. Note: You can select the different source or document types from the "Source type" and "Document type" menus on the bottom of the page.
4. Below are your search results. You can further limit the results by other available options. Click here to go directly to the page below.
5. Below are the search results limited to newspaper articles only. Click here to go directly to the page below. 
6. Click on any of the titles to access the full text. Remember you can use the cite, email, print, and save options for easier access at a later time. Click here to go directly to the page below.