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Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Finding Library Resources

Finding Books & Articles

The library offers a number of databases to help you find academic information. Many databases will help you find academic/scholarly articles, plus books, newspaper or magazine articles, images, and even videos.

Books
Search our catalog through HPU Discovery.  If you want to search only books, select the book tab above the search box. This will limit your search to books. If you are looking specifically for print books, you can then limit your results to just print books using the filters on the left-hand side of your results page. If you are looking for e-books, you can then limit your results to just eBook using the filters on the left-hand side of your results page.

Articles
You can also search through our  HPU Discovery if you want to search only articles, select the articles tab above the search box. This will limit your search to articles and book chapters. You may want to use some of the filter options on the left-hand side of your results screen, such as limiting to only articles. You also may want to limit to just peer-reviewed articles.

Have in mind that HPU Discovery does not search all of our article databases.  To access other databases, you can visit our A-Z database list. For those taking WRI courses we have listed the most popular databases recommended by professors and librarians, some of  which are covered in the video below. 

Searching Tips

Keywords vs Subject

A keyword is a term used to perform a search using natural language. A keyword search will search your terms in the entire record of that item (the title, author, abstract, general description, and subjects). Keyword searches generally return more results.

All databases use the keyword search as the default; if you want to search by subject terms, your need to indicate so in the search field.

A subject term or subject heading is a term selected by indexers or catalogers as a predetermined item description. In other words, a person has looked at the book or article and assigned specific subjects that represent the main topics in that book or article. Therefore a subject term search will only retrieve books or articles assigned to that particular term (similar to what hashtags do). You can find subjects relevant to your topic by looking at the record of the item. A subject search is more relevant and specific than a keyword search.

For more Searching Tips, go to the Research Skills Guide: Searching-for-information.
https://hpu.libguides.com/researchskills/searching-for-information

Source: HPU Research Skills Research Guide