Scholarly Research in SURF
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 the 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.
Keywords = Search Terms
What are keywords? Keywords are the most important words in a research statement or question. They are the words that create significance or meaning.
Why use keywords? Keywords are important in research because they are highly useful to facilitate an online search for information. They open the doors to vast amounts of information. Keywords may also be referred to as "search terms."
Keyword Exercise
Fill out the keyword sheet to explore wording that is used to describe your topic.
A simple tool such as a thesaurus may allow you to find keyword variations that can be used to search the library catalog, article databases, etc.
Searching Databases
Not every option will be found in 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 the yellow Find It button 
The find it button 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!
Connecting Keywords and Phrases
Boolean operators tell the search engine how to connect your keywords together, and significantly affect the search results.
"Quotation marks" - Use quotation marks around a phrase you want kept together.
e.g., "Organizational behavior"
Asterisk* - Use at the end of a word stem to search all possible endings of a word.
e.g., organization* will search organizational, organizations, organization...
e.g., manage* will search management, manager, manage, manages...
AND - Use between keywords or phrases when you want every result to include them.
e.g., "Organizational behavior" AND stress AND manage*
OR - Use between keywords or phrases when you don't care which term is included in a result, so long as at least one of them appears. This is most often used when you string together words of similar meaning to capture more search results, or if you aren't sure which research area to focus on.
e.g., diversity OR inclusion OR discrimination
e.g., stress OR strain OR "emotional distress"
(Parentheses) - To prevent misreading your search, use parentheses to enclose OR strings.
e.g., "management practices" AND (stress OR strain) AND (workplace OR employer OR organization)
NOT - Use to designate specific words or phrases you do NOT want included in your search results. Useful if you need to refine your search after getting too many irrelevant results.
e.g., stress AND (employer OR workplace OR organization) NOT diet