Tutorials
The following brief tutorials will help you learn skills that will make researching easier. Video tutorials can be found below.
Research Skills Tutorial - A step-by-step guide to organizing, researching, and writing an essay.
Finding Books at the Library - The Library Catalogue
The library catalogue (http://catalogue.library.torontomu.ca/) is where you go to look for books, videos and DVDs held by the library. E-books (online books) are also included. This is the most efficient way to search for a known title or known author (see tabs above the search box to search by author or title). Note that the library catalogue does not include journal articles. Use the ‘check your file’ option that appears on the left hand menu of the catalogue home page, to check due dates, fines, and to renew materials.
Finding Journal Articles - Search Everything
Search Everything is the single largest index of journal article content available at TMU, and includes items in our catalogue (books, DVDs, e-books) and beyond. Use Search Everything when you want to do the broadest search possible. It is a good starting point, but depending on your research, you may also want to use a discipline-specific resource like the subject specific databases. Search everything can be searched like Google, but offers refining limits on the left-hand side of the search results. Most useful are the options to limit to scholarly or peer-reviewed journal articles, and to limit by subject. Search everything has millions of records and spans across all disciplines, so you may find that you need to refine your search to avoid having irrelevant items bury your articles of interest.
Finding Journal Articles - Subject Specific Databases
Subject specific databases can be found by selecting your subject in the article search pull down menu in blackboard, or by going to the Databases by Subject /page.
Using advanced search techniques (such as Boolean logic) in Subject Specific Databases will help you to find better results.
The benefit of using subject specific databases is that your search is automatically limited to content in journals relevant to your general area of study. Advanced options like subject thesauri are usually available to help you zero in on the most relevant materials to your research. Search Everything may not cover all of the journals (either at all, or for all years of publication) in every subject area, so you will probably find things in subject specific database searches that you didn’t find in your Search Everything hits.
MeSH Tutorials
Guides to help you understand Medical Subject Headings
Video Tutorials
Additional Videos
Research
- Where to start your research
- What are Scholarly Sources?
- Find Resources in your Subject Area
- Is this an appropriate source?
- Finding Articles from Citations
- Quantitative vs Qualitative Articles
- Understanding License Terms of Use
Searching
More Toronto Metropolitan University Library videos are available on the TMU Library YouTube Channel