Search 1Search to find books, online scholarly articles or newspaper articles that OSU subscribes to or that we can borrow for you for free.
When considering what keywords to use for your search, it helps to think about your topic as representing different concepts. By using one or more words/phrases for each concept, you will build your keywords/search terms to use in various search tools.
Consider this research question:
How does highway traffic impact individuals living with cardivascular disease?
| Concept A | Concept B | Concept C |
|---|---|---|
| highway traffic | individuals | cardiovascular disease |
You could begin the search with the terms above but we can do better. There are likely other terms that also represent the concepts and we need to know how to combine them all together.
Two things to consider:
So for our search above, let's add more terms.
| Concept A | AND | Concept B | AND | Concept C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
highway traffic OR urban air pollution OR traffic-related pollution |
individuals OR adults OR children OR adolescent OR infants |
cardiovascular disease OR heart disease |
One version of a more complete search string looks like this:
(highway traffic OR urban air pollution OR traffic related pollution) AND (individuals OR adults OR children OR adolescents OR infants) AND (cardiovascular disease OR heart disease)
In most of the library's databases, look for this button (or a link with the FindIt@OSU text) to try and access your article online.
When looking for articles, you will see that some articles are available immediately online from our library in full text. First, click on the Online access link, then choose a full text link in the View Online section of the page to get the article online.
Adding LibKey Nomad to your preferred browser helps you go directly from the button (or link with this text) in search tools (e.g., databases, Google Scholar) to a page where you can download the article PDF (when OSU Libraries has paid or free access to the article). See the LibKey Nomad page image below to see where to grab the article PDF.
Additionally, when you are searching for sources on the web and LibKey Nomad is installed in your browser, you may see buttons like these that will help you access or request the full text of articles:
A simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.
Find out how to set your preferences in Google Scholar, so you can use OSU LIbraries subscriptions to get free access to content that is not free on the web:
