Skip to Main Content

BIO 101 Labs (Alexandria)

Direct comments to aanderson@nvcc.edu

Recommended Article Databases

Use the databases listed below to find two articles on your topic.  

One article should be more popular (magazine or newspaper).
One article should be more scholarly (academic journal).

Search Tips

Select the most important 2-3 ideas related to your topic.  Put the word AND between each new word or idea; this tells the database to look for resources with ALL your terms.

hepatitis AND vaccine

Use quotation marks ( "  " ) around phrases:

"hepatitis A" AND vaccine

Use the asterisk (*) to truncate a word; this tells the database to look for all words that have the same base.  In the example below, search results would include vaccine, vaccinate, vaccinates, vaccination, vaccinations, etc.

"hepatitis A" AND vaccin*

Limit Your Results

After your find a list of articles in one of the databases, you can limit your results by date and by source type.

Sources that are more scholarly will be identified as Academic Journals or Scholarly Journals.

Sources that are more popular will be identified as Magazines or Newspapers.

Reading Scholarly Journal Articles

What Is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar searches and links to the content of some library databases and other sources.  Google Scholar includes scholarly articles.  It does not include popular sources, such as magazines or newspapers.

Google Scholar will display a selection/subset of articles from those databases.  

For more information on Google Scholar, reasons to use it, and how to configure Google Scholar to get off-campus access to content from NOVA databases, see this online guide.