Q. Which database should I use when searching for a specific article?

Good morning,

There are a number of different ways of going about this. The easiest, but perhaps not the most efficient, is to just enter the full title of the article plus the author's name in the central search box (Search Everything with Discover GALILEO) on the Library's homepage: https://library.piedmont.edu/. Sometimes this will work, sometimes not, but it's worth a try since it's easy and quick. Try placing quotation marks (" ") around the title of the article. This will instruct the search engine to search for the entire phrase, rather than each individual word (which can result in a huge number of irrelevant results).

A more thorough method of citation hunting requires the name of the journal the article was published in. With this piece of information, you can use the Journal Locator service on our homepage. Let's say the article was published in Educational Psychology. Just type that phrase into the Journal Locator search box and it will present to you a list of databases which include that journal, and the years covered. If you have the full citation, you'll also have the publication date, and you can select which year and which issue you want to browse. If you don't have the full citation, at least you'll know which databases to search in.

One more thing you can try: The third tab on the homepage says "Online Research." When you click on that tab, you have the option of browsing databases by subject. So, if you know the subject of the article in addition to title and author, finding the subject in this list will at least give you several relevant places to start.

If you're still having trouble, please keep in mind that we librarians love citation hunting, and you are more than welcome to send us whatever information you have. If the article can be found, we'll find it for you!