 At this point, I have a bunch of content that I can be working with, and this is going to give me some of the keywords that I might be using in order to launch myself into a search of some of the databases that we have available through the libraries. Okay, so in order to do this, you may have already done some research in OneSearch, and that can be a good place to go, but one of the things is when you're at this stage with the research process, and it can depend on your topic, but when you're at this stage of the research process going to OneSearch, which is a huge multidisciplinary database, that can actually in many cases not be very ideal in terms of locating some good sources on your topic. So what we're going to encourage you to do instead is to go to the databases by subject. So we have a drop-down menu showing up here, we can click on that, and when we scroll through this list, if we're thinking about that topic of the oil refinery and grape-blue-heron habitat, we can kind of scan through here and see what kind of topics might jump out at us. So we see we have environmental studies, we have government information. These are all different things that we could potentially look at in terms of those sub-questions where we're trying to find sources, and it's probably going to make sense to take a look at a couple different places in order to locate the sources that we want. So when I go to the Environmental Studies Database list, what we'll see here is that the folks in the library have organized these by what we're calling the best databases. These are the ones that tend to work best for most folks most of the time in terms of some of these topics that we're looking at, but then we're going to have a bunch of other databases down here as well. And depending on your topic, these might be some of the better ones to go with, just kind of depending on what you're looking for. So we've got lots of different things and we might take a look at each of the descriptions to kind of understand whether or not some of those are going to be some of the things that we'll want to take a look at. Now for this, I'm going to go ahead and just start with a broader search in one of the best bet databases, biological sciences. And the database asked me to log in. I can log in with my Western credentials and then I can start to explore some of the sources that we have here. So what I've decided to do is the starting point is to start out with great blue heron and I put quotes around it because almost all of our databases, what they'll do is if you put quotes around it, it'll tell the database find sources that have that very specific phrase. So it's going to help focus my search a little bit better on that particular phrase if there's something that I know that I want. And in this case, I'm trying to find things in relation to the habitat for great blue heron. So that's going to be perfect. And I've added the word habitat. If I had some other variations on the word habitat that I might put in there, I could always add those and put an or operator in between it. I'm not going to do that with this particular topic. I'm just going to go ahead and start with that broader search. And so after I do that, especially if I'm just using a few terms, then I'm going to get a lot of results coming back. So in this case, I have 444 coming back with this particular database. If I was in a different database, I might have a very different number. It just kind of depends on the source and the keywords that we're using. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that almost all these databases will tell you that they're going to sort your results by relevance. But I can tell you based on experience that that relevance doesn't actually mean all that much. Because when you're doing academic research, you are typically going pretty in depth on a topic, and you're trying to find some very specific things. So I'm going to show you a strategy that is going to help you focus your search while also still learning about some of the terminology that might be helpful to add to either your inquiry question or to your sub questions and to help you kind of understand your topic a little bit better. Before I get to that, I just want to point out that this database along with almost all of our research databases does talk about those different source types and helps you focus by a particular source type as well. So if I knew I wanted to get those scholarly journals and that probably is roughly equivalent to a peer review journal article, although these limiters are sometimes not perfect, because sometimes things like book reviews or news pieces are also published in scholarly peer review journals. So just keep that in mind. You still want to take a look at the characteristics of some of those scholarly sources. But I could use that as a limiter, but I'm not going to do that as a starting point, because right now I'm still just kind of figuring out what kind of sources exist in relation to those keywords. Now, I also know that as part of my topic, my publication date, I'm looking for things that are roughly in the past 10 years, so I could also use that as a limiter. But once again, I'm going to avoid doing that for right now, because I'm just going to focus more on this subject limiter that we see here. Now, if you're in a different database where it's coming through a different platform other than ProQuest, they will also have subject limiters. Sometimes they call them slightly different things, but almost every research database that we provide has some of these limiters out there. And if you click on it and then click on More or Show More, then you're going to get a large set of terms that are going to come back based on the search that you just did. So it will also tell you how many sources come back specifically in relation to the subject terms. There's somebody who's gone through each one of these sources and they have indexed them by these particular terms. So that's going to help you get a little bit more focused on exactly the type of thing that you want. So I know that if I go to the habitats, that it's going to be very specifically focused on gray-blue hair and habitats. Even though I use that as a search term, that search term was getting results coming back in places like abstracts and coming back in other places. And this is going to be even more narrow. And my general rule of thumb that I like to suggest to folks is trying to get your results under 50 before you start to jump into the actual sources themselves. Because that's how you're going to have much more relevant sources to kind of spend your time taking a look at more closely and you're going to save your time overall. Now, at this point, I am going to go ahead and use that source type limiter for scholarly journals. So that's going to get that a little bit more focused. And then I'm also going to narrow the time range as well. And what you'll find is you can always take off any one of these filters if you want to. And that's really handy when you're still exploring your topic. And you want to take off, let's say, one of those subject terms or descriptors and broaden your search out again. I could always clear that habitats term. But now I'm down to 24 results. And so I know that this is going to be a little bit more focused on my topic is going to be a little bit more focused on time in terms of the scope, time scope of what I'm looking for. And so I'm going to be able to go through these a little bit more effectively than if I was just kind of wading through a giant pile of of articles and sources that were coming back. If I want a little bit more information about any one of these, then I could go ahead and click on the title for any one of them. And that's going to give me a little bit more information about it, including an abstract, which is going to be sort of a concise summary of what the article is all about. There shouldn't be any plot twists or turns coming in scholarly sources. So that's going to be helpful. And then sometimes you'll find that the full text is going to be right there. Sometimes you're going to have to look for a PDF link. In this case, I can download a copy of the PDF. And in other cases, you're going to have to follow a find it button, which is going to check with all of our subscription sources that we have out there through the libraries and see if we have access to it. Now, if we don't have access to it, you don't have to worry because what you can do is you can place an interlibrary loan request and that interlibrary loan request will then get you access to that particular article. The turnaround time on those can be pretty quick. Sometimes sources will come back to you within a half hour, but sometimes it can take a little bit longer. So just keep that in mind that it's not something where it's instantaneous, but we can get you a lot of the sources pretty quickly. We never like hearing about folks basically having to pay for some of these scholarly articles because they oftentimes are not very cheap. They can cost a lot of money. So you've already paid the libraries in order to provide you the service where we will get those articles for you. So go ahead and place those interlibrary loan requests and we will get you those articles. And if you ever have questions about how to go about doing that, that's a great time to contact our staff and we'll be happy to walk you through that process and support you in placing those requests. So with the particular research topic that I was talking about a moment ago with Gray-Bluherans and refineries, I'm probably going to want to look at a couple of different sources. So I might go to Web of Science as well, which is a pretty comprehensive scholarly source for scientific articles. And so if I use those same search terms that I just used a moment ago, then they're going to probably get me some results coming back as well. So in this case, it's a little bit less than what we saw with our other data rates, but that can be okay. Web of Science does tend to focus on scholarly sources as well. So we don't have to use that quite so much as a way of focusing our search. But what we'll find here is that we also have something called the Web of Science categories, which is basically the same as the subject terms. And you can click on the more options where you can see the much larger list of those. And what that'll do is it's going to show you the different ways that you could focus that particular search if you wanted to and take a look at some of the different ways that you could investigate that topic. So definitely take advantage of those so that you can get a focus search. And I could also go into a legal source with this database search too. So there's lots of different options. Now if you're feeling a little bit stuck about which database you want to go to or which one would be best for your topic, then that's another one of those situations where it's going to be helpful to potentially contact a librarian. And you may have noticed when we were back on the database link here that we do have some contact information for the folks that are supporting the different areas depending on which one of these we have chosen. Okay so now it's your turn. Go ahead and go back to or go into the research databases. Try to locate a database that's going to be good on your topic. So again coming from the library homepage I'm going to be able to locate those. Find those databases, do some searches, and give yourself a good sort of 15 minute rule. If you're not finding sources and the things aren't working out and you're starting to feel frustrated that's a great time to take a break, maybe take a moment to talk it out with somebody else that's with you, or once again it's one of those times where you could contact somebody in the research and writing studio and we'd be happy to assist you in terms of trying to figure out what kind of terminology might work out in relation to your search. So don't just give up on your your inquiry questions or your search topics simply because you're not able to find sources. There's a very good chance that you're going to be able to find some stuff and sometimes it's just a matter of knowing where to go. Once you find that and once you find some of those initial sources then you're going to be able to find some other good topics. So go ahead and give yourself a good amount of time to just explore and find what is out there and when you have those questions ask them.