Basic Research

Databases, such as Ebsco's Academic Search Premier and ProQuest's PsycINFO, offer many ways to narrow down your results to help you find the most relevant articles for your research. These databases are constructed to include extra information (metadata) that helps you pinpoint the most relevant articles. This allows you to use features like subject headings and peer-review filters that aren't available with search engines like Google Scholar.

Ebscohost is a vendor that provides access to multiple databases. When you conduct a search in an Ebsco database you can search one or more databases simultaneously.

Most article databases also have a variety of filter options, citation export features, and ways to save the articles you're interested in. This video demonstrates how to use these in Ebsco (3 mins).

If you like using Google Scholar, you should know that you can turn on a feature to see links for articles that are in databases that you have subscriptions for as an HSU student. You can also request articles that are not available in full text through our InterLibrary Loan (ILL) service. This video shows how to turn on the Library Link feature and make ILL requests (4 mins).