Frontiers of Science Research Guide: Finding Articles & Books

Boolean Operators

Use Boolean operators to make your search more narrow (AND), more broad (OR), or to exclude a particular word or phrase (NOT).

Advanced Search Tips

• Search for exact phrases with “quotation marks” (“South Park”; "climate change")
• Search for single character variants with ? (wom?n finds woman, women)
• Search for plurals and multiple character variants with * (*celeration finds acceleration, deceleration; child* find childhood, children)
• Citation chasing – use the bibliographies of useful articles to locate other articles and authors to search
• Cited by – most databases will now give you information on articles that cite the article you are looking at. This is very useful not only in finding other relevant research, but also to determine how influential that work has been in the field.

For a more detailed guide to database searching, see the Columbia University Libraries' Database Searching Guide.

The best way to find scientific or other scholarly articles is to use a database. Databases are organized collections of information that have advanced search algorithms that enable browsing, searching, and sorting of electronic resources. Databases index a variety of resources such as scholarly articles, manuscripts, book chapters, conference papers, dissertations, theses, archives, government documents & statistics, as well as image, sound & video collections. Most databases provide abstracts and full-text links to individual resources.

Access databases, including Google Scholar, through CLIO records for seamless off-campus Columbia University access.

Pro Tip: for more efficient and refined searches, choose a database other than Google Scholar for your search.

You can find additional databases covering research from the sciences and other disciplines via our Research Guides.