FYS INF01: Design Thinking - Innovation - Entrepreneurship

Booleans: AND, OR, NOT

• AND combines two search words together. Both must appear in your article, narrowing your results. 
• OR allows you to search for synonyms or like terms. Only one of the terms must appear in your article, broadening your results. 
• NOT removes a specific term from your results.

Quotation marks

• Phrases stick together as one keyphrase. For example the terms "climate change"; "blue whale"; and "Cretaceous period" should be written in quotes to keep the two words together in your search results.

Asterisks

• Add to the end of a root word to find all words that include all words that include that root term. For example volcan* with an asterisk on the end will return results with the words volcano, volcanic, volcanology, volcanism

Limiters

• Usually found on the left
• Narrow by subject, date, or peer-reviewed
• For this particular project, you want to cast as wide a net as possible (at least at first), so you likely won't use too many limiters. 

The Salisbury University Resource Finder (SURF) is a federated search; this means it will search across many library sources from one search box. You can use SURF to search for books (both physical books located in the library and eBooks), newspaper and magazine articles, books your professor has left on course reserves, scholarly articles, academic journals, and databases.

You can find many scholarly articles using SURF. When you use the SURF search box, your search results will include a menu on the left side with a variety of facets that will refine your results by limiting your search to certain perimeters. For example, if you want to limit your search to only articles that are peer reviewed, you will want to use the facet "Peer-reviewed Journals" facet under "Availability."

If you don't limit the search to only peer reviewed articles, SURF will still let you know if an article is peer reviewed via the purple peer review icon.

Not every option will be found in the Salisbury University Resource Finder (SURF). Some databases, such as Statista, are not indexed and there are also times when a database search may make more sense for your research needs. If you want to find more focused results within a certain discipline of study, searching individual databases can be really useful. 

From the Database A-Z List you can search databases by subject, vendor, or title/keyword.

By searching by subject you can find databases in a variety of business disciplines including, accounting, business, information systems, and management.

When looking at records within database you will see a few ways by which you can access the article immediately:

• HTML Full Text
• PDF Full Text (or a similar Get PDF option)
• View at Publisher

When those options are not available, you may see a "find it" option.

The find it option will check other SU databases for the article or take you to an option to request the article via Interlibrary Loan (ILL). ILL requests are pretty fast, so I wouldn't recommend skipping this option if the article looks relevant to your needs!

The A-Z Database list shows all the databases available to search at SU. The list is alphabetical but you can search by subject, title/keyword, or provider.