Search is almost never a linear activity. To effectively find high-quality sources, you may need to filter, sort, narrow, or expand your search. You may find that you need to alter your keywords, add subject terms from a controlled vocabulary, limit by date, or perhaps even revise your topic. This is all part of having a search strategy, and your search strategy log assignment should help you document the 'paths' you've taken to find your sources.
Some tips:
You need at least 15 sources (15-20 for the annotated bibliography) and 5 sources must be from scholarly journals. NOTE: These requirements are for reference; refer to your course materials for precise requirements. See this video for tips on reading a scholarly journal article.
LibKey Nomad is a helpful browser extension that allows you to quickly find full-text documents from a variety of sources, including references in Wikipedia and Pubmed. See our post for information on downloading.
On Google Chrome, you can configure the extension to work only when you click the icon (see below), or leave the default settings.
Other helpful browser extensions for research include Unpaywall, Google Scholar Button, and Hypothesis
Start your search with QuickSearch on the Libraries homepage. This will search across all the Libraries' resources, however you should also try the databases below.
Designed primarily to support undergraduate-level research, Academic OneFile is a good general-purpose periodical index with journals and popular magazines that includes much full-text, many going back to the 1980s. Provided by the New York State Library, NOVELNY.
In addition to searching for individual articles and ebooks in our databases, you can also directly browse journals related to your field. You may not have full access to all material, but you can always use our Interlibrary Loan Service to request individual articles.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) maintains this digital library of their publications and others from selected publishers. It includes articles, proceedings, conference materials, and special interest groups. Some articles are free to access, however others may require a subscription (you can always request ILL or check via LibKey Nomad for another version of the article). Student memberships for the ACM are reasonable (currently $42 combined with access to this digital library) and may be useful in your professional development.
Semantic Scholar is an academic search engine from the Allen Institute for AI. Like Google Scholar, it crawls academic web content from publishers and other sources to help you discover scientific literature and data. Some materials will be free to read, others may be available via the Libraries.
Lens.org is a free, an online patent and scholarly literature search interface. Some materials will be free to read, others may be available via the Libraries.
The dblp computer science bibliography provides open bibliographic information on major computer science journals and proceedings. This may be useful for finding a relevant journal, or list of works from a particular author.
Google Scholar is a subset of Google that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. It is a great place to start; begin with a broader search and narrow down your terms until you get closer to your topic. When on campus, links to articles found in the Touro databases will automatically appear, but you can enable this functionality at home by accessing the Google Scholar settings and searching for Touro under “Library Links.”
You may find information useful for your papers via Blogs, company websites, government websites, or other sources. These sources sometimes fall into the category Grey Literature. Examine these sources carefully, checking for the affiliation or reputation of the author/publisher, the use of references in the text, and tone or use of advertising, among other factors. For help evaluating sources, see this guide.
Below are some examples:
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