Getting started with research
Resources
Library Search
A good place to start your research. From here you can access books, DVDs, journal articles, newspaper articles and other types of resources.
Recommended databases
Use these databases to find more information for your assignments. Resources you find in these databases will be different from what you find in 'Library Search.'
Background research
Use these to find more information about a concept, or to provide a definition of a concept in your assignment.
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Provides access to 100 reference books in a range of subjects.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica Online This link opens in a new window
Contains the text of the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica plus additional articles and images, videos and primary sources.
Academic databases
Use these to find academic journal articles and books on your topic.
- 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.
- Wiley Online Library This link opens in a new window
Full text from journals covering the areas of life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities.
Full text access is from 1 January, 1997 to date. - 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.
- ProQuest Ebook Central Search for authoritative E-books
Image databases
- Unsplash Unsplash photos are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash. Be aware that photos from other sources may be visible on the page which are licensed differently.
- Pixabay A repository for outstanding public domain images
- Pixnio Pixnio contains public domain images which are free of copyright restrictions.
- Pexels Free to use without attribution
- Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons licensed and public domain images
- Australian Bureau of Statistics This link opens in a new window
Australian statistics and census data.
Browse the ABS by topics (a more detailed list).
Finding international statistics
How Do We Find Statistics Internationally To Compare Against Australia?Here is a list of statistics websites from various countries, with similar types of information to the ABS:
Reference your sources (including statistics, datasets, images and tables) using the APA guide.
You can use operators in a Google search to help refine your results.
site:
This tells Google to return results from specific types of websites. For example, if you want to find information from Australian Government websites on ageing populations you could type:
"ageing population" site:gov.au
into Google. All of your search results will be from sites that end in gov.au - meaning they are Australian government websites.
You can also use this operator to search within certain websites for information. Sometimes this works better than using the website's own search feature. Example:
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'.
