English Research

Here are two great databases for finding newspaper articles and reviews:

ProQuest Central

This database provides access to many full-text magazine and newspaper articles, as well as some scholary works.

Lexis/Nexis
This full-text database provides access to many North American and international newspapers.

When searching on Google, keywords are very important. These are what determines the results you will get. Changing your keywords may help if you are not seeing the results that you want.

To ensure that you get very specific results, you can put quotations around words that need to be kept together. By doing this, only results with those specific words together will show up. For example, the keywords British imperialism may bring up websites about Britain and others about imperialism. However, if you type in “British imperialism” you will get sites dealing only with British imperialism.

Another way to filter your Google results is to look for a specific domain. A domain is the .com, .org, .edu, .gov part of a website url. To search for a specific type of result, you can type site: ____ and add edu, gov, mil, org, etc. For example, by typing in site:gov the only results that will come up are .gov websites. You can do this with all types of domains.

Question everything you read online!

• Who wrote the article?  Do they have credentials? Why does what they say matter?
• Where was this article published? Is it reputable?
• What is the domain? Is it .com, .edu, .org, .gov? What does that say about the information you are looking at?
• Does the article have references? Does it need references for the information presented?
• Does this article have bias towards one opinion? How important is recognizing bias in my research?
• Is this the best information I can find about this topic?