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Quest for quality information sources

Students in their first year of tertiary education are inclined to exclusively use the Web in their search for information sources for their assignments. The types of information sources you use will depend on the assignment requirements and the assignment question you are attempting to answer. However, the Web sources might not hold accurate and reliable information. For this reason, it is suggested to use the academic or scholarly material the VU Library Search and electronic databases contain. Through VU Library and Databases Search, you can locate journal articles, books chapters, newspapers articles, research reports, conference papers and many other sources of information related to the subject area you are researching.

What are JOURNALS and DATABASES

An author writes an article on a particular topic and sends it to a publisher. Articles on similar topics are published together in a journal (also known as a periodical). The journal publisher assesses the article. It may be reviewed by other writers in the field. This is known as a peer-reviewed process (and a peer-review article). The article is then published, either in:

ONLINE - An online database is a collection of journals a database provider packages together. The library subscribes to the online databases. These can be searched using keywords, author names and subjects for relevant information.

or

PRINT - The library buys a subscription to the print copy of the journal and it is available on the library shelves.

What's a library database?

A short animation that explains what library databases are from a student’s perspective.

Finding journal articles in databases

The Library Search is a good starting point for conducting research on any engineering topic, especially when you are not sure which database you should use. For more in-depth search, it is helpful to search databases individually. Listed are the recommended databases that will allow you to find relevant information resources on your topic of research. 

Boolean operators

Boolean Operators are the words AND, OR, and NOT used in library databases that can make searches more precise, and save you time by removing the need to go through all the search results in order to find most relevant articles.

AND narrows the search resulting in more focused results, for instance, searching for  “alternative energy” AND Australia, all articles in your result will include both concepts (keywords)

OR broadens the search by instructing the database to search for any of the words, which is particularly useful for synonyms or related terms, i.e. “alternative energy” OR “renewable energy” OR “solar energy”

NOT narrows the search by instructing the database to remove all unnecessary search results, for example “alternative energy” NOT “nuclear power”

Relevant journals

Searching Ecospecifier Global Database