Reminder:
To access Gavilan subscription content off campus, you will be promted for Your 'password' will be your full GavID number. The instructions are on the login page.
Step 1:
From the Library homepage, select Full List of Library Databases from the Find Resources dropdown menu. http://www.gavilan.edu/library
Select Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection from the list of Social Science databases http://www.gavilan.edu/library/databses.php
Step 2:
Enter your research terms.
The most challenging part of looking for an article is picking the correct search term(s). Our best advice is to look at your text book and class notes for topics that interest you. Since you are being asked to read an article at least 10 pages long, it may as well interest you!
I chose "sleep disorders." Because we are searching a database entirely about psychology and behavioral sciences we do not have to add "psychology" or "human behavior" as search terms.
The basic search screen works like Google. If you search for multiple words, the database looks for articles with the first word AND the second word AND the third word, not necessarily together. You can force the database to search for your words as a phrase by putting them in quotes. ie: "sleep disorders". You do this when you only want articles that have those words in that order.
When you have entered your search terms click on Search
Step 3:
Evaluate and narrow your results as needed.
Your results will be a list of articles that have your search terms in them.
Your assignment is to find 1 scholarly journal article about some aspect of psychology or human behavior. Use the database to narrow your results to include only scholarly journals. Note the Limit to box in the left column. Click the Scholarly Journals box and then click the Update button.
Since you are looking for 1 journal article this is also a good time to limit your results to Full Text articles only. That way your results now only reflect articles that you can read now.
If your results are still too broad you can refine your results by subjects or subject thesaurus terms. So not only will the articles contain your particular search terms, but they will be about that topic. We can add "sleep disorders." This way our results are full text, scholarly, have the keywords "sleep disorders" and "psychology" and now are about Sleep Disorders.
If you use these topics to narrow your results you can remove them just as easily if you want to return to your original list. Look for the small box with the x to remove the term from the search.
Each entry lists the title of the article, the author(s), the publication in which it appeared, the publication date, and whether or not it is in the database full text. If it is full text you will see a link to pdf full text or html full text.
EBSCOhost indexes (lists articles that have been published) for thousands of periodicals. It has full text articles for over a thousand periodicals. Since we already limited our results to full text all of our results will have the Full Text link. Click on the link to begin reading the article.
Step 4:
Are the articles relevant?
Once you have narrowed your results then you need to determine if they are relevant to your topic and if they are long enough for your project. Check the basic listing for length of article. In order to read the abstract/summary of your article to determine relevance put your cursor over the magnifying glass icon next to the article. 
This will display a popup window with the publication information, the abstract and links to the citation and/or the full text.
Read the abstract to determine if it is about your topic or interesting to you. If it is relevant, then you need to determine if it is a research article. Most commonly, a research aricle is about a study which includes a research question that is tested through some kind of experiment. You will look for clue words such as this study, control group, participants, sample, respondents, methodology. If there is a link to the full text you can click on it to read the article. If there are three dots after the abstract it means there is more to the abstract. Click on the Detailed Record link to read the rest of the abstract.
Since you are looking for only 1 article you will want to make sure to use the Full Text limiter.
Useful Tools:
From your full text display you can take advantage of some useful tools on the right side of the window. Print and email are easy to identify. The icon that looks like a yellow piece of paper can be used to get help with your citation. Once you click on the icon you will be presented with the citation in several styles. Select the one you are using, ie: APA. Be sure to review and edit as necessary to be in the proper APA format.
Step 5?
Ask for help?
You can get help with your searches from the reference librarians at the Library. We answer questions in person, by telephone, by email and by chat. Click on the Ask A Librarian icon on the library homepage to get our contact information.
