32 STEPS

1. Welcome! This tutorial will provide a brief tour of Central Search and some of its primary tools and features. Central Search can be accessed from the home page of the Library's website...

2. ...or from the Databases page.

3. Linked below the main search bar is a PDF guide with tips and tricks on how to use Central Search and create a search strategy.

4. You can type your search keywords directly into the search bar to perform a basic search.

5. You can check the Full Text box to find only full text articles.

6. You can also check the Peer reviewed (scholarly) only box to find only peer reviewed articles.

7. Click Advanced search link to open the advanced search menu.

8. One of the first things you will notice is that Advanced Search has three search bars. These search bars work the same as one, but they allow you to break your search string into smaller chunks, making keywords easier to manage and organize.

9. Below the search bars is a list of filters that you can apply to your search to limit the types of results that you see.

10. Clicking Peer Reviewed will filter your results and return only peer reviewed resources.

11. Clicking Full Text will filter your results and help you locate resources that are immediately available to you.

12. Often, instructors will tell you to find sources published within a certain date range. Published Date allow you to target resources published in a set time frame.

13. Click the top search bar and type in your search keywords.

14. All fields is an option that allows you to tell a database where to search for your keywords. Clicking this will open a drop down menu with a number of options. Choosing the "Title - TI" option, for example, will search for your keywords in the title

15. Click Search

16. This is what the results page looks like.

17. This one search returned 179,205 results.

18. To narrow down our results list, we can add search filters. Click All filters.

19. In the menu to the right of the screen, choose any applicable filters. Let's pick a few and see how it impacts our results. First, I need a Full Text article.

20. Click Peer Reviewed

21. Click Past 5 years to filter our results to only those published in the past five years.

22. That should be a good start! Click Apply to add these filters to our search.

23. We now have 27,479 results!

24. The first result is a peer-reviewed academic journal. The results list will tell you the article title, the author(s), the name of the publication in which it appears, and the year it was published.

25. It will also tell you how to access the article. In this case, the article is available as a full text PDF.

26. If we need more information, we can click the title.

27. This opens up the item record. The record will tell you all of the important information that you need to know about an article, such as the publication information and the abstract (if available).

28. If we choose to use this article in a research paper, we can quickly create a reference for it by using the Cite tool. Click the open quotes in the top menu bar.

29. Select the appropriate style and then Copy to clipboard. You can paste the generated citation into your paper, but make sure to double check that it is in the correct formatting before you move on.

30. Click the X in the top right to leave this screen.

31. Click Results to return to the results page.

32. That's it. You're done! Now, explore Central Search on your own to see all of the possibilities.