Top 5 Databases to Jumpstart Your Research: A Librarian's Guide (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: What's up, guys? It's Rob Stephens here, your favorite research and instruction librarian, and today I'm here to talk about the top five databases to jumpstart your research. It's a video that's been much requested, but before we get started, I just wanted to show you how to get to our databases if you're on our website, nickels.edu slash library, and under the library search box, you click the databases tab and click all databases. They're listed here alphabetically, so without further ado, let's talk about our top five databases to jumpstart your research. Coming in at number five is the CQ Researcher. The CQ Researcher is an amazing way to get started your research. It's got well-written articles by professionals in the field. It includes wonderful pictures and infographics, and it's well-cited, so if you want to mine those citations for your own research, it's a great place to get started. Coming in at number four is Credo Reference, and something that Credo Reference and the CQ Researcher have in common is that they are wonderful places to get started your research, however, they are not scholarly sources. Credo Reference comes highly recommended by one of our librarians named Brandy Burbonte. Brandy loves it for its pro-con articles for this mind map, which can give you synonyms for whatever you're searching for to generate those better search terms. It also provides definitions and other types of reference, and it's a powerful way to start up that research, find out more about your topic. And at number three, we have your best newspaper database. This newspaper database is formerly known as my favorite word, LexisNexis, today known as NexisUni, not sure why they changed the name. NexisUni is your home for newspaper and law reviews and cases and statutes and legislation and company and financial information. NexisUni is where you want to go if you need that background information, if you need to know what journalists are saying about a topic. Again, not a scholarly source database, but a really strong place to find out the background information you need for your paper. And number two, it's the friend you always loved, JSTOR. JSTOR is an amazing way to find those scholarly sources. It has tons of scholarly sources, 38,000 hits on Universal Basic Income, tons of journal articles. It's always been there, always going to be there, I have to imagine, and it's got a really flourishy J logo you all love. Go here if you're looking to impress your teachers with those scholarly sources and find amazing information. Finally, our number one database, I know you guys have all been waiting for it. It is the DiscoveryTab. The DiscoveryTab at Nichols.edu is our most comprehensive way to search. We like to call it the Google of the library because it searches the most databases, it searches for articles, for books in our collection, for journals, for e-books, for all different kinds of things. I've had patents show up in here, I've had electronic articles, reports, academic journals, and I'm going to do another video on how to manipulate these search results to get better search results for this, so check that video out. Thanks for tuning in to our top five databases video, and keep getting A's on those papers.