The following tutorial will show you how to find the best databases in GALILEO for your topic.
GALILEO is your portal to hundreds of databases containing articles, books, images, and more. We know that much content makes deciding which database to use a challenge, so the GALILEO interface provides a few ways to help you make the best database choices for your needs. Today, we will look at the Browse by Subject and Databases A-Z tabs.
Let’s say that you need literary criticism about The Color Purple by Alice Walker for a paper. You can go to the Browse by Subject tab to find databases for that subject. Just choose the subject area for literature and then Literature and Literary Criticism
The Articles and Databases tab has a ranked list of databases so you can easily see which ones to try first.
Notice that there are databases that include information specifically about your subject as well as multidisciplinary databases, like Academic Search Complete and Research Library that include information about almost any subject.
If you’re still not sure which database to pick, the “more»” links beside each database gives information about the database to help you decide. There are also links to database tutorials that give you tips on using the database if you need them.
If you don’t want to pick just one database and would rather search them all, you can go to the Subject Search tab.
The Subject Search tab lets you search across several databases at once. This is what we call federated search or metasearch. At the bottom of the search page you can see that we have preselected a group of databases that are most relevant to this subject. Now we can search several databases at once for literary criticism on The Color Purple.
Searching several databases at one time can save you time, but often you end up with too many articles to review.
If you’re getting way too many results, try going back to the individual databases and using the Advanced Search options in one of them to limit your search.
Another way to find databases for your topic is to browse the list of “all databases.”
Go to the Databases A-Z tab to find databases by name or keyword. Click the “All Databases” link and you will be taken to a list of databases where you can go directly to a database by clicking on its name. In addition to browsing by name, you can also search databases by using a keyword, such as nursing or philosophy. Notice you can click on the more links here as well.
This concludes this tutorial on finding the best databases in GALILEO for your topic. If you have any questions, please check GALILEO Help for FAQs or use the Contact Us form to submit a comment. Thank You and Happy Searching!