Most searchers rely exclusively on keywords to retrieve records in databases. In many cases using keywords works well. If you wish to retrieve more precise results, try searching by the specialized terms of the database, also known as "controlled vocabulary," and often referred to as "descriptors." The order in which you enter your terms can matter as well. For example, often you can best search by author by typing the last name before the first name.

Although books are the dominant form of scholarship in the humanities, journal articles can provide excellent coverage of cutting-edge developments in the design disciplines. Articles appear in scholarly, trade, and popular periodicals, as well as newspapers.

Many assignments require students to limit their search to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles. "Peer-reviewed," "scholarly," "academic,"and "refereed" are often used interchangeably to describe manuscripts that underwent expert review before publication.

Hint: Some databases such as Academic Search Complete and ProQuest Central will allow you to limit your search to scholarly journals.

Not all books contain a unified narrative from the beginning to the end of the text. Some are collections of essays, with each chapter having a unique title and author(s). These works share features with both books and journals. Like a book—unlike a journal—there is more lag time before publication. However, like a journal—unlike a book—catalogs do not trace the titles and authors of every chapter and researchers must use databases and indexes to search for chapters by a particular author or on a specific subject. If you have difficulty attempting to track down an essay or a chapter in a book, I am happy to help.

If you discover pertinent citations to journal articles in your online searches, use Find it!, OneSearch, or Fetch Item to track down your resources.

If we don't own or subscribe to the material online, you can obtain rapidly many articles and chapters via the Libraries' ILL software, ILLiad.