Need more focussed information on your topic? The databases listed below will provide you with articles from the scientific and professional literature. They are organized broadly by scope so pick generally according to your topic.
Remember: It's good research strategy to do your searches in MORE THAN ONE database.
To browse the more than 200 databases the library subscribes to, please visit our Research database page.
A library database provides access to the contents of thousands of scholarly journals, sometimes covering a particular discipline or sometimes multi-disciplinary in scope, meaning they may cover many subject areas.
Better than a Google search, databases come with tools that help you refine your search to get more relevant results, as well as links to related articles. In most cases, you can be confident that the articles you find will be credible sources to incorporate into your writing.
Here is an introduction to searching Academic Search Complete, one of the library's largest, multi-disciplinary databases. Although the interface is somewhat different than the "Best bets" listed on the tab to the left, the method of searching and the tools will be similar.
Key features of most databases:
If you'd prefer to browse directly, here are a few of the specific brewing journals and magazines available through the library. The links below will take you to the library subscription information and will indicate whether a title is online or in print.
Login with your KPU ID if you are off-campus.
Add Google Scholar to your suite of research tools. Google Scholar is a search engine that covers much of the scholarly, peer reviewed literature from academic publishers, plus conferences, theses and dissertations, abstracts and more. Some of the content is available full text, and some will be citation-only.
You can configure your settings to include links to articles available from Kwantlen Polytechnic Library subscription journals to avoid hitting publishers' paywalls. See the screenshot below.
Want a quick introduction to searching Google Scholar, including Advanced Search? Thanks to the University of Alabama Libraries for this video.
Wikipedia is a popular place to start your research and will likely be one of the top results in a Google search of your topic. A well-developed Wikipedia article, with its content boxes and overviews, will provide a “road-map” of your subject, identify key terms and concepts, and help you to focus on related and narrower sub-topics. Every article provides links to external references and further reading that can be useful sources for you to follow up. (See Wikipedia’s own policy on Verifiability and its discussion of what can be considered a reliable source.)
However, while it is not quite true that anyone can edit a Wikipedia article, there are concerns about the potential for inaccuracies and misinformation. Unlike more traditional scholarly sources of information, content on Wikipedia is continually changing. For these reasons, your instructors may caution you against using Wikipedia in your research, and will probably discourage you from citing it.
Use this resource to learn more about your topic, and follow the external links at the bottom of the page for credible sources of information.
Use the reference list of a Wikipedia article to track down scholarly and professional sources.
The screenshot below is from the Wikipedia page Hop Production in the United States.
Determine what type of source the reference is, then search the library's Summon, catalogue, or journal title search to see if it is available. This particular reference is to an article published in the journal Nature Communications, an open access (free) scholarly publication.
