One of the best places to start looking for free access to Scholarly Articles and Scientific Literature is through the Library's Academic Databases!
If you've never been there before, from the Shoreline Community College homepage, you can select the Current Students icon at the top of the page and Navigate to the Library tab from there:
The Shoreline Community College Library homepage features quick links to lots of our great resources and services, but we'll click on the Databases tab to enter our school's repository for scholarly journals and articles.
A Database is a large platform of online scholarly publishing that works like a searchable directory. Databases might specialize in a particular type of content or subject areas, while others are more interdisciplinary. Shoreline subscribes to over 100 databases, so the quicker we can narrow down to the type of information we're looking for, the easier our search will be.
Try starting by clicking on the drop-down Subjects menu listed at the top of the page:
In this example search, we're going to select for Biology, but you may have to decide which Subject best fits your Information need, even if your class type isn't specifically listed and you can also select for multiple subjects that may overlap.
Scroll down to click on your target Subject and then select the Search tab:
By selecting for a subject, we've now narrowed our search down to 14 databases, and you can see which Best Bets! are already recommended to you as good starting points.
In this example, we're going to navigate to the first recommended result, Academic Search Complete, and start searching. As the name sounds, this database is going to have resources for all different kinds of subject areas:
The search page interface for each database may look a little different, but the Academic Search Complete landing page gives you a good idea of the search options for these Databases. In Advanced Search, you can combine multiple search terms, use filters to select for the desired date range of your search, and select for some of the criteria you want your results to have.
We'll look more at an example database search on the next page.
