Finding Sources: Learn It 4

Finding Books

Scholarly articles are often found in journals, which compile several peer-reviewed articles on similar topics in the same place. You will often find these articles in online databases or in the periodicals section of your library, but it is still valuable to find pertinent information in actual, physical, books. Books cover virtually any topic, fact or fiction. For research purposes, you will probably be looking for books that synthesize all the information on one topic to support a particular argument or thesis. They will be especially beneficial if you want lots of information on a topic or want to put your topic in context with other important issues.

To find books, you should look in the library catalog, which is typically the main search bar located on the library homepage. The catalog includes books, reference books, media, maps, and titles of periodicals (like magazines, journals, and newspapers). Note that the catalog does not search for articles within periodicals and journals, and you’ll need to utilize a separate article search to find those.

Search result from a library search for a book. The result shows to look for four important things: what library the book is in, the location of the book within the library, the call number, and whether or not the book is available. These pieces of information are all listed in the search result.
Figure 1. Search result from a library catalog search.

You can locate the book by finding the call number. Call numbers are arranged in alphanumeric order. The call number is based on the book’s subject, author’s last name, and publication date. Call numbers are designated based on the library’s classification system, which determines how books are organized. Many academic libraries use the Library of Congress Classification, while others use the Dewey Decimal System.

Finding books using the call number

Let’s say you are looking for the book called Cyberspace romance: the psychology of online relationships by Monica Whitty and Adrian Carr. You searched in the library catalog and found the call number: HQ 801.82 .W55 2006. Here’s what that means:

  • HQ: Subclass HQ refers to The Family, Marriage, Women
  • 801.82 refers to Man-Woman relationships, Courtship, Dating
  • W refers to the first author’s last name, “Whitty”
  • 2006 is the year the book was published

Finding Articles in Databases

So far, you have learned how to locate a book you want on the library shelves. What if your project also requires scholarly articles?

To find scholarly articles, you need to look in a database. A research database lets you search across the text of millions of articles published in thousands of academic journals. General databases have a little bit of everything (like a big retail store). Examples of general databases include Google Scholar, the library articles search, or JSTOR. These are good starting points when you’re starting out and shopping around for articles on a wide range of topics, but you may find there are too many search results to sift through. If you’re getting too much irrelevant stuff, try a specialized database.

A specialized database—often called a research or library database—allows targeted searching on one or more specific subject areas (i.e., engineering, medicine, Latin American history, etc.), for a specific format (i.e., books, articles, conference proceedings, video, images), or for a specific date range during which the information was published. Most of what specialized databases contain can not be found by Google or Bing.

This video explains what library databases are and why you should use them.

You can view the transcript for “What’s a library database? | RMIT University” here (opens in new window).

Your library will probably have an “article search” or “database search” link to begin your search. When you search article databases, your results list contains citations to a variety of information sources. Depending on the database, you might also find citations to book chapters or to books. Below is an excerpt of search results in PsycINFO. Note the different types of information sources that appear.

Search results from a database showing a dissertation, scholarly article, book, and book chapter, highlighting the variety of results you can find through a single database search.
Figure 2. This PsycInfo search resulted in a variety of information sources.

Everything you need to locate your article is in the citation: the title of the article, the author, the title of the journal, the volume and issue number, the date of publication, and page numbers.

Screen capture of a search result in a database, showing how easily identifiable the important components of an article are. The title of the article, author, title of the journal, volume and issue number, dat of publication, and page numbers are all listed together.
Figure 3. The important components of an article are all found within the citation.

You can typically click on the links below the citation to view the text of the article, or your library may direct you to the location of the article.