LibGuides: Resources for PaGE Research Fellows: Library Resources


Library Research Guides

Basic Library Resources

Welcome to Mount Holyoke and LITS!

LITS/Library website
A good place to start for finding and accessing all the services and research resource LITS.
LITS = Library, Information, & Technology Services

Key Research Databases and Library Services:

Discover
Discover is a huge, interdisciplinary tool combines many research databases together into one global search. It includes the catalog of all items in our library in addition to multiple article databases including PsycInfo, ERIC and others mentioned below. It's great for exploring a topic or for casting a wide net to find a very obscure item.
Finding Articles - PaGE Research Fellows tutorial
This tutorial describes how to search and access full-text versions of research articles using Mount Holyoke library databases.
Five College Library Catalog
Unlike Discover (above) the catalog contains only the books, videos, etc. our library owns or journals we subscribe to. (Note that it does not include all the individual articles within those journals - only the journal names.) It's a smaller universe for searching and also a quick way to find out whether we have particular items you need. You can search all Five College libraries at once, or just Mount Holyoke's collection. Print books available at the other colleges can be delivered to Mount Holyoke for you to pick up or you can visit their library and check them out with your One Card.
Borrowing Books from the library
Interlibrary Loan
Books and articles that are not available in the Five college libraries may be requested via interlibrary loan at no cost to you.
Learn more about Research Resources at MHC
Short self-paced tutorials for learning about our library resources.

Accessing Mount Holyoke research databases from off-campus

If you are not on the Mount Holyoke College network (for instance, if you are off-campus) many of the databases that LITS subscribes to will require that you log in before giving you access. These databases include the ERIC, PsychInfo and Academic Search Premier databases among many others. When you click on one of these databases, the Mount Holyoke log-in page will appear (seen below) and you will need to log-in using your Mount Holyoke username and password.

Reseach Resources Particularly Useful for Education Topics

Discover
A combined database made up of many individual resources including the library catalog and the majority of our subject-specific databases.

Search the library catalog only (enter search terms and then limit) or dozens of databases together. A great place to start your research on almost any topic.

ERIC/Education Resources Information Center
ERIC is an online library of education research and information, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. The database provides access to information from journals included in the Current Index of Journals in Education and Resources in Education Index. Content includes journal articles, research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, dissertations and theses, and books dating back to 1966.
PsycINFO
The American Psychological Association’s resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, contains records and summaries dating as far back as the 1600s. Journal coverage, which spans from the 1800s to the present, includes international material selected from periodicals in dozens of languages.
Academic Search Premier
This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 4,600 journals, including full text (PDFs) for nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. Backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.

Useful Web Sites for Educators

Advanced Database Searching

Scholarly databases like Academic Search Premier, ERIC or PsychInfo offer advanced search options. If you're having trouble coming up with good search results, click on the advanced search link to limit your search by certain types of results, search specific fields, find only full text, and more.

Some additional advanced tips:

Try truncation.
In many databases, you can use the asterisk symbol (*) within or after a word to tell the database to fill in any letter or combination of letters. For example, typing 'wom*n' would return results with both 'women' and 'woman'. Typing 'philosoph*' would return results that include the words 'philosophy', 'philosopher', 'philosophize', as well as the plurals of all of those words. (Note: not all databases offer this feature, but it's worth checking!)

Use AND, OR, and NOT.
Combine search terms by using one (or more) of these connectors. Using 'AND' will show results that include both of your search terms; 'OR' will show results that contain either of your search terms; and 'NOT' will show results that include one but not the other.

Try nesting searches.
You can use parentheses to refine your search. This tells the database to search within the parentheses first, then combine with other search terms.

For example, ("nuclear power" OR "nuclear energy") AND ("public opinion" OR attitudes)

Search within specific fields.
Using advanced search options, you can limit your search to only a specific field, such as title, author, subject terms, or abstract.

Make use of subject headings.
Research databases have pre-defined subject headings associated with every article or resource. If you find a source that seems particularly useful, look at the search terms in the item record to construct a search for similar resources.