Research Tools

Online Periodical Databases

• EBSCOhost-ACADEMIC SEARCH PREMIER: Indexes and abstracts 7966 magazines and journals, American, British and Canadian in the fields of social sciences, sciences and the humanities. 3971 titles have full text available online, and 3123 full text titles are peer-reviewed journals. (Remote access available - drop by Reference Desk for password - If you experience difficulties with remote access, please click here) NEW! Find out how to search EBSCOhost Academic Search Premier using this tutorial.
• EBSCOhost-MAGILLOnLITERATURE Plus:  Provides full text information about literary authors and their works for short and long fiction, drama, science fiction and fantasy and includes book reviews. (Remote access available - drop by Reference Desk for password - If you experience difficulties with remote access, please click here) NEW! Find out how to search MagillOnLiterature Plus using this tutorial.
• EBSCOhost - POINTS OF VIEW / CANADIAN POINTS OF VIEW: These products provide opposing viewpoints on various controversial current events. (Remote access available - drop by Reference Desk for password - If you experience difficulties with remote access, please click here)
• PROQUEST: Canadian Magazines & Newspapers Online: indexes 800 Canadian magazines & newspapers, of which 260 periodicals have full text available online. (Remote access available - drop by Reference Desk for password)
• EUREKA.cc: Provides indexing and full text for major Québec French-language newspapers - La Presse, Le Devoir, Le Soleil, Le Droit, Voir as well as l'Actualité Québec.  New expanded coverage provides access to full text of both English and French magazines, major newswires and transcripts from Canadian media programs. TIP: Use Advanced seach capability (Recherche Avancé) for best results. (Coming soon! Remote access)
• Erudit: FREE Quebec-produced database that directs to full text resources in French & English
• Find Articles: The Web’s free article search (popular, non-academic magazines)
• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
• National Research Council: Canadian scientific journals full text.

Academic-Level Information on the Web

Searching for material published by “authoritative” sources on the Internet can be a challenge. Using conventional search engines will result in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of results from a wide variety of sources. Some useful tips to judge the quality of an Internet site or document are:

• Select sites whose domain name ends in “edu” or “org”. For example: “www.un.org” is the official United Nations website and the authoritative source for U.N. documents, policies, etc.
• Make sure that any document you use has an author(personal or corporate) and a date of publication indicated. This information will be required when you include the source in a bibliography.
• Be aware of the bias or “point of view” of the website you are selecting.

For academic metasites which have been recommended for high quality, check out Academic Web Sites by Subject.

Directories & Search Engines

Directories offer a collection of links to Internet resources chosen by site creators or evaluators and organized into subject categories.

Search Engines provide a searchable database of Internet files collected by a computer program called a wanderer, crawler, robot, worm, or spider. An index is created from the collected files and the results are presented in a schematic order. Users should try out different services in the course of their research. (CHOICE, Aug 2007)