 This video demonstrates how to perform a basic search in a library database. Library databases allow you to search for articles in magazines, scholarly journals, and newspapers. The database I will be using is called Academic Search Complete. It is a general interest database, so it will have articles from a wide range of academic subjects. Before you begin your search, you will think about your topic and come up with keywords related to that topic. I am interested in affirmative action, so I will type that in the search box. Before I hit search, I want to show you some of the options available on this main screen. You can see that the default is for the full text box to be checked. When this box is checked, only articles that are available in full text as opposed to just the article abstract will come up in the results. Okay, I'm going to hit the search button now. Wow, the database found over 5,000 articles. I'd like to narrow that down a bit, but first let's look at the results a bit. Most of these are academic journal articles, as you can see by the academic journal icon next to the title. Academic articles are written by scholars, professionals, or other experts in a field. Anything with periodical next to it is a magazine article. Now let's look at how to narrow the search a bit. Over here on the left side of the page, you'll see Refine My Search, which offers many ways to narrow the search. First, I am interested in finding only academic articles about my topic. To limit to academic articles, you can click the box for Peer Reviewed. Peer Reviewed is another term for academic. I want to know what the scholarly literature from the last five years says about affirmative action. So I'm going to limit the date range to 2014 to 2019. This narrowing brought the list of articles down to 318. Scrolling through, I can see that my search successfully found only academic articles. I'd like to take a look at one of these articles. I'll open up number three. I do this by clicking on the article title. On the next page, you can see who the authors are, the journal the article was published in, and you can read the abstract. Once you determine it is an article you'd like to read, you can open the PDF of the article here on the left side of the page. From here you can print the article, cite the article, or copy this link to access it later. To get back to the results page, click on the results list link in the upper left corner. And that's how you perform a basic search in a library database. Thanks for watching.