Personal development portfolio
Getting started with research
Use 'Library Search' to start your research. From here you can access books, DVDs, journal articles, newspaper articles and other types of resources.
Use an encyclopedia for background research and to understand your topic:
- Encyclopedia Britannica
Useful for background information about a topic
Recommended databases
The databases you select for your research will vary depending on which course you are in, and which subject area you are searching. Find your course Library Guide to see specific recommended databases.
- ProQuest This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary database with over 9,000 titles in full-text. Covers many subject areas including business and economic, health and medical, criminology, psychology, military, news and world affairs, technology. - Taylor and Francis Online This link opens in a new window
Full text access to research journals covering the Social sciences and humanities collection, Science and Technology collection, Medical and Fresh collections, Expert Opinion journals and Expert Review journals. Access is available from 1997.
- Informit This link opens in a new window
Informit provides access to full content from a range of Australian and Asia-Pacific journals, monographs and books, conference proceedings, research papers and reference materials, as well as video content. - ProQuest Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
Database of electronic books (eBooks) across a wide range of titles on a lending platform. Includes all titles on former EBL and Ebrary platforms.
Image databases
Find copyright-free and creative commons licenced images to use in presentations.
Boolean searching
Most databases and catalogues let you combine keywords when searching. This will help you get better results. Watch the Prezi below to find out how.
Search
You can expand or narrow your search results by using connectors (or operators) to form a relationship between your search terms.
AND - connects your terms together. You will only retrieve results that contain ALL your terms
OR - expands your results. You will retrieve results that contain ANY of your terms
NOT - excludes terms from your results
More search operators
(brackets OR parentheses) - brackets groups terms together, particularly useful for grouping synonyms in an OR search
"quotation marks" - put terms in double quotation marks to search for the words as an exact phrase
You can use a database or search engine's 'advanced' search options to bring up the AND, OR and NOT connectors, and also to be able to choose which field is being searched for your terms. A regular or 'basic' search will search for your terms across any/all fields, but in an advanced search you can specify to only search fields such as 'title', 'author', 'subject' or 'abstract'.