Start My Research: Acquire

Methodist College has over 50 different databases containing books and articles to help with your research. All of these databases work basically the same way, though, so once you know how to use one you can use them all. Simply enter keywords based on your research question and then use the limiting options to further focus your search. Sometimes it can take a bit of trial and error to find a combination of keywords that leads to useful results.

There are some tricks to entering your keywords that might help you achieve better results.

1. If you have a phrase you are looking for like “peanut butter”, put quotation marks around it to search for that exact phrase.
2. There are words called Boolean operators, the most common of which are AND, OR, and NOT that you can use to create combinations of search terms.