Getting started on a research project takes time, planning, and getting to know your topic. This is a guide to help you with this process.
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Consider what you know about the topic you are going to research or write about. Unless you are already an expert on it, there's probably a lot you don't know or understand about it--which is why it's a good idea to do some preliminary or background research on a topic first.
These are good resources for this purpose:
Scholarly Publications
Next you may want to see what researchers and scholars are saying about this topic. The Library's discovery tool, OneSearch, as well as a multi-disciplinary article database like Academic Search Premier are great resources for this.
Subject-Specific Article Databases to Widen Your Search
If you have an assignment that simply asks for 3 or so scholarly articles, you may be able to get by with OneSearch and Academic Search Premier. But if you're working a an assignment for an upper level course, or have a higher article requirement, you may want to get into our subject-specific article databases. For this, we recommend our Research Guides. In each of the guides we provide a list of recommended article databases for you to search, based on subject.
You may be thinking by now, "What's the difference between using OneSearch to search for articles vs. an article database like Academic Search Premier or PsycInfo?"
Great question.
Aside from books, videos, and government documents and reports, OneSearch contains much of the full-text articles available though the library's various subscriptions. The reason to use our article databases instead is that they open up a world of scholarly literature that isn't necessarily available full-text at Bemidji State, and thus, would not appear in a OneSearch query.
This may sound negative, but it's not! If there is an article you come across in one of our article databases that is not available full-text, you can simply request a copy of it through our Interlibrary Loan service. It's easy, fast, and free! This allows you to have access to the best research suited for your assignment, even if it's not immediately available in our our databases--just follow the prompt in whatever database you're using. Find the right article database for you via our Research Guides.
These are related resources that may be useful for completing a research assignment.
