A giant database that covers a wide range of topics. Use it to find peer-reviewed scholarly articles, as well as articles from trade journals, newspapers, and magazines.
A great resource for writing assignments. Browse a wide list of subject categories from the database’s home page to find articles and information from scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and multimedia. Content is provided in the fields of biology, chemistry, criminal justice, economics, environmental science, history, marketing, political science, psychology, and more. Includes Gale’s visual Topic Finder tool.
NOTE: You will be prompted to enter your Western ID to log in to library databases.
A database is a collection of online information resources - articles, films, images, data, statistics, etc. Western Library databases provide articles from newspapers, magazines, trade journals, scholarly journals, books, and streaming video on a wide variety of subjects.
Databases are subscriptions purchased by both college and public libraries, and made freely available to students and the general public with a student ID or public library card.
Western Library has general, multiple-subject databases and subject-specific databases. Subject-specific databases contain detailed information within a specific subject area. For example, business databases contain information about industries, companies, and other business-related topics and cover a wide range of information including histories and historical context, articles, case studies, reports, rankings, profiles charts, financial data, statistics, legal issues and more.
Library databases can save you time and energy! They contain vetted, fact-checked, and credible information created by trustworthy professionals and experts. They also organize content and include tools for efficient research.
How do databases work? Why are there so many buttons and filters!?
Although they may look a little different, all databases have the following features:
There are several databases that work great for Human Services research. We recommend Psychology (Gale OneFile), Academic Search Premier (EBSCO), and Academic OneFile (Gale OneFile). You can access these directly using the links above and below.
Although these databases look totally different, they have common features. Visit our EBSCOhost guide and watch the short videos to learn how easy it is to use EBSCO databases.
An interesting feature, unique to (Gale OneFile), is it's visual Topic Finder. Perform a basic search in Topic Finder to see a wide variety of subtopics. Click on one of the subtopics to bring up a list of related articles. For example, the basic search term "domestic violence," produces the subtopics you see in the diagrams below. When you click on an individual tile or a section of the wheel, a list of related articles appears on the right side of the page. Both the tile view and wheel view bring up the same information, so choose your favorite view.
Visit our Gale Guide and watch the short videos to how easy it is to use Gale Databases.
Choosing a TopicThe first step in any research process is choosing a topic. In the Human Services profession these may include a variety of topics that impact your clients, such as
Basic Searching StrategiesBegin your research by creating a list of search terms - single words or short phrases - based on your choice of topic. Databases respond best to nouns that identify something specific. Terms like those below a make good starting point for a basic search.
When you search, enclose multiple-word terms in parenthesis (domestic violence) so the database searches for articles about "domestic violence" rather than searching the two words "domestic" and "violence" separately, which will bring back a lot of irrelevant results.
Because different authors use different terms that mean the same thing, you want to create a small list of alternate search terms so you don't miss a good article just because it uses different words than you did. For example:
Use Thesaurus.com or look at Subjects features in the databases to expand your word lists.
Advanced search strategies are useful if you get too many results from a basic search. To reduce or specify the results, try combinations of several words and linking them with AND, OR, NOT. This is known as Boolean searching.
Remember, databases respond best to nouns that identify something specific. Words like impact or effect don't identify any one specific thing, and tend to muddy the results you get. It is in reading the articles you come to understand the impact or effect of a specific situation on individual clients, families, or family members
A giant database that covers a wide range of topics. Use it to find peer-reviewed scholarly articles, as well as articles from trade journals, newspapers, and magazines.
A great resource for writing assignments. Browse a wide list of subject categories from the database’s home page to find articles and information from scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and multimedia. Content is provided in the fields of biology, chemistry, criminal justice, economics, environmental science, history, marketing, political science, psychology, and more. Includes Gale’s visual Topic Finder tool.
NOTE: You will be prompted to enter your Western ID to log in to library databases.
