There are many ways to conduct your search in order to find exact articles. When searching a specific title, putting your search terms in quotation marks narrows down the search results. This method is called "exact phrase searching".
When you are searching for a specific author's body of work, use our "Advanced Search" feature on the library homepage.
Select "author" in the drop-down menu to the left of the search bar. In the search bar, enter the author's full name.
Boolean search allows users to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) such as AND, NOT and OR to help produce more relevant results. For example, a Boolean search could be "Pharmacology" AND "drug interaction". This would limit the search results to only those documents containing the two keywords.
Qualitative Research:
Quantitative Research:
Do you need access to articles and/or books that are not available in our own databases/collection? Submit an Interlibrary Loan request to receive a copy from an outside institution. The video below explains the process for requesting an item through Interlibrary Loan.
During your studies at WCU, your professors will ask you to look for original research articles. "Original research articles" are standard scientific articles. Often published in scholarly peer reviewed journals, primary research articles report on the findings of a scientists work. They will almost always include a description of how the research was done and what the results mean. The author(s) of the article are the same people conducting the research.
Students will often pull up "literature reviews" thinking that they are original research, when they are not. Literature reviews can be easily confused with primary research articles. They are also published in peer reviewed journals, but seek to synthesize and summarize the work of a particular sub-field, rather than report on new results. Essentially, they are reviewing original research from a variety of academic journals and performing a data analysis on them, comparing and contrasting results to explore a common theme. Review articles will often lack a “Materials and Methods” section.
https://guides.westcoastuniversity.edu/research
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