Scholarly, peer-reviewed articles are a critical type of information in nutrition science. Scholarly articles are published in journals. Journals are compiled in databases. This page introduces you to library databases that can help you find these types of articles.
Databases index (compile and organize) and allow you to search thousands of journals at once. Lister Hill Library has over 400 electronic resources/databases. Why so many, you ask? Each database has its own subject focus and strengths. Don't worry, you don't need to search all of them. The goal of this page is to expose you to 2 key health sciences databases.
No database has all articles; therefore, it is a good idea to search more than one database on your topic. This is another reason to learn to use more the one database. Imagine the dots below are articles and the circles are databases. As you can see, there is some overlap, but none of the databases have all articles.
Before you can search a library database, it's important to first understand how to talk to a database. Telling a computer system what you want is quite different from telling a friend what you want. One of the basic set of tools used in databases are what's called "Boolean" operators or terms. View the 4-minute video below for a quick explanation of Boolean operators.