For off-campus access to library online resources, remember to follow the links from CLIO or this research guide. You can also use the proxy bookmarklet.
Can't find an article through our libraries' collections? Use Interlibrary Loan (ILL) to request a copy for free.
Barnard and Columbia have access to hundreds of electronic databases. If you aren't sure where to start, you might try CLIO Articles+ search, which searches multiple databases at the same time. Search for links to the databases through CLIO or take a look at the subject specific research guides for guidance to the best databases for each subject.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. It is also very useful for seeing if other scholars have cited a book, article, etc. Search on the title, and then follow the "Cited by ..." link.
This resource includes citations and full text articles in academic & professional disciplines, e.g., business, economics, gender studies, health, literature, management, political science; as well as news and general interest items. Search multiple databases simultaneously or select individually from among ABI/INFORM (business); Accounting & tax; the American Medical Association; Dissertations; Ethnic NewsWatch, GenderWatch, Research Library, or major current and historical US newspapers (including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, etc).
Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes journals from 1964 to present and includes citations and links to book and media reviews.
Boolean searching is based on an algebraic system of logic formulated by George Boole, a 19th century English mathematician.
In a Boolean keyword search, the terms are combined by the operators AND, OR and NOT to narrow or broaden the search (in CLIO, Ovid, and some other databases, you DO have to enter them in capitals). This type of search is possible in most library catalogs and databases, but Google and other Web search engines do not carry out OR and NOT searches properly.
These Venn diagrams help to visualize the meaning of AND, OR and NOT; the colored area indicates the items that will be retrieved in each case.
The operator AND narrows the search by instructing the search engine to search for all the records containing the first keyword, then for all the records containing the second keyword, and show only those records that contain both.
The operator OR broadens the search to include records containing either keyword, or both.
The OR search is particularly useful when there are several common synonyms for a concept, or variant spellings of a word.
Examples using OR:
medieval OR "middle ages"
"heart attack" OR "myocardial infarction"
vergil OR virgil
Combining search terms with the NOT operator narrows the search by excluding unwanted terms.
Examples using combinations of the three operators:
puritans AND women AND (massachusetts OR connecticut OR "rhode island" OR "new hampshire")
(adolescen* OR teen*) AND (cigarettes OR smok*)
reagan AND "star wars" NOT (movie OR film OR cinema OR "motion picture")
"zora neale hurston" AND (correspondence OR letter* OR diar* OR autobiograph* OR memoir*)