 To access Sociological Abstracts, click Databases on the UTM Library homepage. Then click Sociological Abstracts. If you're off campus, you'll be prompted to enter your U2ID and password. Before searching the database, make sure you've identified your keywords and created a search string using Boolean operators and other special characters. For help developing keywords, check out our keyword worksheet and video available on the UTM Library reference help page. See the link in the description. After clicking on the link to the database, you will be presented with the advanced search screen where you can enter your search terms and select from various options that will help you limit your search results. Let's imagine that we want to search for articles on socioeconomic status and the summer slide. Instead of typing an entire question into the search box like what effect does socioeconomic status have on the summer slide, we're going to break down our question into keywords. To save us some time, let's enter the keywords and search string that we developed in our keyword worksheet video. You can find the link to the video in the description. Here they are. You'll notice that we've added quotation marks around some of our search terms so that the database holds these words together as an exact phrase. You'll also notice that we've typed the word or between our search terms. We use or when we want to include synonyms or related terms in our search. To optimize our search results, we're also using and. We use and to connect two or more concepts including their synonyms. Need to add another term to your search? Click on the add row button under the search boxes. Before submitting your search, you'll want to take a look at the various limits and search options available in the database. For instance, the drop-down menus on the right-hand side of the search boxes. These options tell the database where to search for your keywords, such as in the abstract or title. It is recommended that you start your search using anywhere so that the database looks for your search terms in all fields. Another useful feature is the peer review button. When you select this option, you are telling the database to limit your search results to sources that are peer reviewed. If you need to find articles published during a particular time period, use the publication date drop-down menu. For example, if I want to find articles published from January 2010 to the present, I'm going to select after this date and then enter December 31, 2009. If you know that you need to find scholarly articles for your research, you can filter your search results on the advanced search page by clicking Scholarly Journals in the source type. Now let's look at our search results. The database found 15 articles with our search terms. The options and filters that we saw on the advanced search page are available on the left. We can also modify our search and add or remove more keywords by clicking Modify Search. To download the article, click Get Full Text or Get It, U-T-L. You'll be redirected to a page where a download PDF icon will be available. If you want to see the full article record, including the abstract, click on the title of the article. Need help searching sociological abstracts or other databases? Feel free to email us at askutml.utm at uterano.ca. Use the online chat from the UTM Library homepage or reach out to us over Zoom and we can help.