Search Strategies

Search strategies

Searching a library database requires you to break your research question into searchable concepts. The library databases work differently than Google and a major pitfall when searching a library database is expecting the search interface to understand language and interpret your search question. Therefore, you will want to:

1. Identify the major concepts of your research topic.
2. Break your topic into major concepts that can be used as search terms. A concept could be a subject term, technical jargon, or a proper noun. These concepts are usually nouns of one or two words.
3. Combine these search terms together, but only one or two concepts at a time.
4. Run your search.
5. If you got no results; change your search terms or remove concepts from your search.
6. If you got thousands of results; add another concept or develop a more exact search by using scientific terminology as search terms. This will narrow your results.
7. Review your search results by looking at the title and abstract. Is the article on your topic? The title can give you a good indication of what the article is about, but sometimes you will need to look at the abstract to determine the topic of the article.

List of Math & Computer Science Databases

ACM Digital Library This link opens in a new window
The ACM Digital Library is the full-text repository of papers from publications that have been published, co-published, or co-marketed by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Springer Link This link opens in a new window
Providing corporate researchers with access to millions of scientific documents from journals, books, series, protocols and reference works.
ScienceDirect - All Subscribed Content This link opens in a new window
Elsevier ScienceDirect is a leading scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 journals and almost 30,000 books.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Complete is a scholarly, full-text database designed for academic institutions. The database includes full text for 1800 publications as well as images, for nearly every academic field of study.
MathSciNet This link opens in a new window
MathSciNet is a comprehensive database covering the world's mathematical literature of the past 61 years. It provides Web access to reviews and bibliographic data from Mathematical Review and Current Mathematical Publications. It provides links to original articles and free access to Featured Reviews.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full-text digital archive of over 700 scholarly journals, especially strong in Social Sciences, Humanities, Economics, and Mathematics.
ArXiv.org This link opens in a new window
arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is also partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
Project Euclid This link opens in a new window
Project Euclid was developed and deployed by the Cornell University Library, with start-up funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is now jointly managed by the Cornell Library and Duke University Press. It was originally created to provide a platform for small scholarly publishers of mathematics and statistics journals to move from print to electronic in a cost-effective way. Through a combination of support by subscribing libraries and participating publishers, Project Euclid has made 70% of its journal articles openly available. As of 2015, Project Euclid provides access to over 1.2 million pages of open-access content.
Webmath This link opens in a new window
Webmath is a math-help web site that generates answers to specific math questions. The math answers are generated and produced real-time, at the moment a web user types in their math problem and clicks "solve." In addition to the answers, Webmath also attempts to show to the student how to arrive at the answer as well
Web of Science - ALL This link opens in a new window
Web of Knowledge provides seamless access to the Science Citation Expanded®, Social Sciences Citation Index®, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index™.
Wiley Online Library This link opens in a new window
Wiley is the international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, with strengths in every major academic and professional field and partnerships with many of the world's leading societies