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Academic Search Complete

The world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 12,500 journals and a total of more than 13,200 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,400 journals.

JSTOR
An archive of more than 1200 core scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Fulltext back to their date of first publication to within the current 2-5 years.

Literature Resource Center (LRC)
Up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers from around the world in all disciplines and time periods.

MLA Bibliography
A bibliography of scholarship in literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. Contains over 1.8 million citations from more than 4400 journals and series and 1000 book publishers.  About 75% are language and literature journal articles.

Project MUSE
Full-text titles from over 100 scholarly journals in the Basic Undergraduate Collection. There is no way to limit to language on Project Muse searches. 

Encyclopedias & Dictionaries

Credo Reference
Over 600 online reference titles in all subject areas.  Allows cross-referencing between titles and expanding searches into the Truman catalog and other library resources.

Online Book Collection

Primary Sources

America's Historical Newspapers
Full-text collection of over 1000 U.S. historical newspapers.  Divided into three collections: Series I (1690-1876), Series II (1758-1900), Series III (1829-1922).  Part of the Readex Archive of Americana database.

Style & Citation Guides

Citation and Writing Guides
Guides for how to use the American Psychological Association (APA) citation style; the Modern Language Association (MLA) citation style; and the Chicago/Turabian citation style.  This page also has information on how to use tools that automatically format bibliographic information for you such as: Zotero, and EasyBib.com.

Web Sites

• How can I access the databases from off-campus?
• How can I avoid plagiarism when I am using ideas and words that are NOT of my own creation in my writing?

• Keyword searching is the most common way to begin exploring a topic, whether you are in TruSearch, a subject database, or the library catalog.  There are a variety of other types of searches you can do, but they generally come along later, as you get more familiar with a database, the catalog, etc.
• Use  keywords to search for information on your topic, rather than typing in complete sentences.
• .Make use of Boolean operators (also called connectors)--AND,  OR,  and NOT--with your keywords:
  
  AND will narrow down your search.  For example: folklore AND material culture retrieves less results than searching for folklore alone.  It is more specific.
  
  If you need more results, you can add synonyms to your search with the operator OR:
  people OR groups
  
  You can use "nesting" which allows you to use both AND & OR in one search.  For example:
  rural AND folktales AND (people OR groups).  
  It is important to group your similar terms together, within parentheses, when doing a nested search.
  
  NOT helps you exclude terms you may not be interested in seeing and will narrow your search.  For example:
   tradition NOT religious
   
• Boolean operators should be capitalized in TruSearch but they are not case-sensitive in other databases.

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