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Book a research consultation with one of your MSMU librarians!
Email Us - library@msmu.edu
Your question will be answered by a librarian within 24 hours.
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Coe - Chalon: 310.954.4370
McCarthy - Doheny: 213.477.2750
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Stop by the Circulation Desk at either library and ask in person.
An extensive collection of journals and books in the Arts and Sciences, including classical studies, ecology, economics, history, language and literature, mathematics, music, art and architecture, cultural studies, film, folklore, performing arts, philosophy, political science, sociology, and religion.
Check out Mount Saint Mary's University's digital primary source collections in JSTOR!
An authoritative resource for music research with an ongoing mission to chart the diverse history and cultures of music and musicians from around the globe. Includes Grove Music Online (GMO), The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Oxford Companion to Music.
Provides digital humanities and social sciences content, including electronic journal and book collections from leading university presses and scholarly societies. Check out Muse in focus for curated bibliographies on newsworthy topics.
Covering fine art, fashion, design, architecture, film, performing arts, and more.
Includes more than 650,000 biographical entries covering international figures from all time periods and areas of study. Users can search for people based on name, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, birth/death dates and places, or gender, as well as by keyword and full text. It offers authoritative reference content alongside, videos, audio selections, images, primary sources, and magazine and journal articles from hundreds of major periodicals and newspapers.
With Google Scholar you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Search Google Scholar from here:
Be sure to link Google Scholar to the MSMU Library to get free access to many library resources.
To do this from the Google Scholar homepage:
Virtually all journals that MSMU has full-text access to online are indexed in our E-Journal search. Simply type in the title, hit search, and you will find all the databases where you can access the journal.
If you don't have the full citation, try using Google Scholar to find the article. Check out Google Scholar Search Tips here.
If you cannot find the article using the first 2 steps, we probably do not have immediate full-text access to the article, but that doesn't mean that we cannot get it for you! Try requesting it through Document Delivery.
Articles are usually delivered within 2-3 business days.Library databases don't search using full sentences. Instead, they use keywords and boolean logic.
Your best bet is to use keywords to search to get the results you are looking for.
Keywords are the essential words in your research question that focus on the main concepts you are interested in.
Other filler words are non-essential to the search process.
The keywords are highlighted and bracketed in the research question below:
Research question: What is the connection between [race] and [police brutality]?
Keywords: your keywords and key phrases are then "race" and "police brutality"
Boolean logic is a system that shows relationships between sets of keywords, terms, or subjects by using the words AND, OR, and NOT. In library databases, we use these terms to specify exactly what we are looking for when we perform a search.
The term Boolean comes from the name of the man who invented this system, George Boole.
Using connecting words like AND, OR, & NOT can help you find what you are looking for.
Learn more about keywords and other search techniques with this guide from UCLA: Search Techniques
Sometimes called scholarly, peer-reviewed, academic, or even "refereed', these terms all refer to journals that require review by a group of experts in the field before an article can be published. These experts are looking for things like appropriate methodology, proper research, and citations, advancements to the field, etc.
When searching for articles, look for the option to narrow your search by peer-reviewed, scholarly, or ‘refereed’ materials. There will most likely be a box you can check to limit your search.
Learn more about the peer-review process in this video from the University of Kansas: Peer Review In Three Minutes
