 Hey there Bruins! Today your friends at the UCLA Library are here to help you navigate the UCLA Library website to help you find the best database to research your paper topic. Most students tend to turn to websites such as Google Scholar when they search for sources because of their familiarity with its interface. Although Google Scholar and other similar sites are a good place to start researching, they lack a lot of features that databases offer. Databases are more likely to offer more relevant, high-quality, and recent information because the information they include has to meet certain selection criteria. The UCLA Library pays for access to thousands of databases for UCLA students, which you can access through the UCLA Library website. Once you learn how to use these databases, you will see how much time they will save you and how much more information they have to offer. Start by pulling up the browser of your choice and going to library.ucla.edu. There are two ways to find relevant databases for your research paper. We will explore the first way now. Click on database to begin searching. Here you are given two options, either to search for your database in a complete list of all databases or to search by subject. Unless you are looking for a specific database based on teacher recommendation or otherwise, searching by subject will save you the most time and lead you to the most relevant sources. Click on find databases by subject. You are now asked to choose which subject area you would like to look into. In this class, you are most likely to stay within these three subjects, but feel free to explore all of them until you find all of your necessary sources. For this example, we will be looking in the physical sciences and engineering subject. Choose a specific field under your selected subject that best matches your needs. We will be looking at the environment and sustainability field for the topic that we have been working with. Here you see all of the databases that will have relevant sources for your topic. Each of the databases that are listed come with a detailed description of what kinds of sources are included in that specific database. Read through these descriptions and choose which one to start with. Some questions you should ask yourself while you're reading these descriptions are. What types of resources such as peer-reviewed journal articles or newspapers are indexed in this database? What subjects and years are covered? Will the type of information from these sources be appropriate for my audience? Do the sources in this database have any intrinsic biases for or against my topic? For example, the database environmental sciences and pollution management would take a conservation angle on our topic. Knowing this, you may want to explore other databases that would offer more diverse opinions. We will be looking at the environmental sciences and pollution management database. Different databases will have different interfaces for searching for articles, but virtually all of them will let you string different terms with and or and not terms. You can construct your Boolean search in these databases using the term grid we constructed earlier. Now you are brought to a list of relevant sources that will greatly help you research for your paper. When you click on a result, you will not only be brought to that source, but also other search terms that could further your research. Moreover, when you first get to the results page, you can use the filters on the left-hand pane to further narrow down your results. You can set filters by publication day, document type, language, etc. One useful filter for this class would be filtering out only reviews under document type. Review document types are more condensed documents for specific research and are easier to extract information from. The second way is a more direct approach to finding a database. Start by pulling up the browser of your choice and going to your class's library guide. For engineering 183, it is guides.library.ucla.edu forward slash e-n-g-183. This webpage includes a collection of information that a librarian specifically collected for this course. Click on the article databases tab and you will be brought to a page which includes tabs for all of the topics your course covers this quarter. Choose whichever one aligns with your topic. You are presented with a list of databases that a librarian has chosen for that topic. You can search within these databases the same way as we previously discussed. By no means are you tied to these specific databases. They are only a suggestion in case you don't know which database to start with. Feel free to search for more databases using the first method. Now that you know how to search for databases, use either method to find one for your topic. Need help with the next steps? Feel free to stop by at one of our many campus locations and set up a consultation.