The Lone Star College libraries maintain a collection of research databases for you to use! These databases collect authoritative, credible sources, including articles from expensive scholarly journals, and make them searchable to you. Searching can be a little more complicated than using a regular search engine, but a librarian can help show you what to do. The upside is that you can put together much more specific searches, which means you have fewer results to wade through, and the ones you get are more likely to be relevant.
When you're ready to search the databases, you'll usually want to go to the Advanced Search page. Most of the databases have one.
Once you're on the Advanced Search page, you're going to have more than 1 search field now (usually 2-3 with the option to add more as needed). What to put in here? Think back to your brainstorming where you came up with alternate search terms and broke your topic down into its keywords.
The default AND joiner has the most limiting power. When you search for "cat AND dog," you will get fewer results than just searching for cat because the database will only bring back articles that mention both terms.
Access online library materials through the library databases!
To access the databases from off-campus, you will be prompted to enter your LSC email/password or your 14-digit library barcode.
In its most basic sense, a database (marked on these guides by the padlock icon ) is just a selection of information designed for you to search and retrieve stuff from it.
Amazon is a database you're probably familiar with: it's limited (only contains things you can buy through them) and retrievable (you can search and filter your results to find what you're looking for).
The library databases contain reputable, reliable sources of information to support researchers like you! This means everything from digital encyclopedias, e-books, scholarly journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles, streaming videos, statistics, and more.
Note: Scholarly articles tend to be behind paywalls. The same things that make them so reliable (authoritative authors, critical review, thoughtful analysis) also make them expensive.
Google Scholar skims the web for scholarly articles but not all of them will be accessible online for free. Check the databases to see if the library has access. If not, and you have a couple days to spare, you can also do an interlibrary loan (ILL) request to get the article for free.