This project is to find a scholarly journal article. For our example, let's look for a scholarly journal article for a child development class. This process will work for any discipline, just substitute your topic.
1) Start on the Library homepage (http://www.gavilan.edu/library)
2) Next click on Research Databases option in the middle of the page
3) From the resulting list you can select from more than 30 subject specific databases. The one most likely to help with this project is Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection in the Social Sciences category.
4) Now that you are in the Psychology database you can enter your search term(s). Because we are using the psychology database we don't need to use the term psychology, it is automatically included. When selecting a topic, I recommend reviewing your lecture notes and textbook(s) to select something you find interesting. Let's use language acquisition as our search terms.
5) We can stick with the term as we entered it or we can use one of the suggestions from the database as seen above. I'm going to select language acquisition in children.
6) The result list will include articles of many types. We have been asked to get a scholarly artilce so we need to limit our results to Scholarly journals.
7) Next, we need to make sure we can read the artilce now. So we want to limit to Full Text (full contents of the article).
8) Now let's review the results and pick an article. If you want to know more about a particular article you can place your cursor over the magnifying glass and review the article abstract to determine if it is appropriate for your research.
9) Once you have identified an article you want to read and/or print. Click on the Full Text Link. Now you can read the article, print it or email it to yourself using the tools on the right.
If you have any questions you can always use the chat reference feature on the library homepage or send us an email with your question.