FYS 103 (Brickner): Search@UW

If you want to find books and articles using one search.

If you want to do a broad, multidisciplinary search.

If you want to use a variety of information sources.

If you need books or media that UWSP owns.

If you need books or media that another UW System library owns. 

Current events (Search@UW updated only weekly. Individual databases, such as Academic Universe (Lexis-Nexis), updated faster).

Regional, state and local newspapers.  Instead use a newspaper databases such as NewspaperARCHIVE .

Historical New York Times

Specialized non-article/book databases (e.g. Naxos Music Library).

If you want to do a more focused search for articles or if you need to use a database geared towards a particular subject area use the Find Databases link on the library website instead.

If you need an article from a specific journal. Or want to browse a specific journal. Use the Journal Titles A-Z link on the library website instead.

If you need a book that is not owned by UWSP or another UW System Library. Use Worldcat instead.

Consult the Finding the Search Tool that Fits Your Research Needs page of this guide for more details.

Search@UW is a new search tool that allows you to search for books, articles, media, digital material, and more from one interface. Many of these are available full-text online. For those that are not, use the InterLibrary Loan (ILL) service to request a copy for your research.

 Initial Search Strategy

1. Develop your topic sentence.  For example:  I am interested in what factors impact teenage pregnancy rates in the United States.
2. Develop a search strategy using keyword searh terms from your topic sentence.

   Keyword search terms: teenage pregnancy United States

1. Limit your results list
2. Sort your results list
3. Evaluate items in the list
4. Expand your search if necessary
5. Find your item either:

• online full text (pdf or html),
• in print in the library,
• or through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).

Other searching strategies:

1. Use synonyms. For example: adolescent pregancy or teenage mothers.
2. Use quotations to search for specific phrases. For example:  "teenage pregnancy" or "United States".
3. Use the truncation symbol (*) to expand your results. A truncation symbol will cause the search algorithim to look for the root word and for variations in the spelling in the ending of a word after the *. For example, using using pregnan* will return results with pregnant, pregnancy, and pregnancies.

By default, Search@UW searches Everything - one search for all of the categories listed below. You can also use the drop-down menu to switch to one of these specific sets of search results:

Articles: access to articles, images, streaming audio/video, and other materials from most of UWSP's Library databases.

Books & Media (UWSP): books & media available from UWSP (however, you will see items from other UW Libraries if they own the same item as UWSP)

UW Digital Collections: digitized materials from the UW System, including some dissertations/theses, presentations, images, audio/video recordings, and more.

If you did not find enough resources you can expand your search to retrieve more results.

Books & Media (UW System): books & media available from UW System Libraries.  You can have physical materials sent to you here at UWSP for free.

Expand My Results: retrieve additional articles that the UWSP library does not subscribe to.  You can request that digital copies be emailed to you for free using Interlibrary Loan.