Disciplinary Literacy Skills Project (ARC Students)

The SPU Library provides you with free access to millions of online articles from scholarly academic journals in all disciplines, many of which are not available for free on the Internet.

Find these articles by searching in the SPU Library Databases.

Your first step will be to brainstorm some keywords. 

• For example, if you want to find information on the artistic process, describing how artists think and apply that thinking to their art making, you might try the search "Artists AND Creative Ability." 
• It will be important to have other words ready such as synonyms or broader/narrower terms. 
• You can also look at the language of the sources you are finding to build your searching vocabulary.
• Look at the References, Works Cited, or Bibliographies of sources that you find to identify more sources
• Put relevant article titles into Google Scholar and click on "Cited By" and "Related" to find even more!

See the screen shots and instructions below for details. Reach out with your questions! LGG@spu.edu

Choose a specific database using the drop down menus to find the ones in your subject area.

Or search multiple databases at the same time:

Start with Academic Search Complete.

When you have this open, click on "Academic Search Complete" above the search boxes.

You will then get a screen that lists all our EBSCO databases.

You can add specific ones or select them all.

Searching Tips:

1. Keep your search simple. Put one word or phrase in each search box

2. Sort your results by relevance

3. Look for "subjects" or "descriptors" to gather more keywords.

4. Try multiple searches using different combinations of keywords

Click on the "Access options" button for the ways to get the full text such as,

•  PDF
• Online full text
• Linked full text
• "Check for full text"
• Request from Inter Library Loan

Please ask me or another librarian if you need help finding the full text.

Connect to Google Scholar from the SPU Library Databases A-Z page to get hooked into our full text.

Use the "cited by" and "related articles" features to find even more relevant sources