Mental Health Awareness: Articles & Databases

The following strategies can be useful to help you search for and choose an academic/scholarly research article:

1. Analyze your topic statement for search terms

• Change any question into a statement.
• Identify the important ideas or concepts within your topic statement--these are usually nouns (or short phrases containing a noun)
• Nouns make the best search words, so turn any important verbs into nouns first
• For more information and examples - check out the University of Toronto's How do I choose good keywords page (link below):

2. Connect different concepts with "AND"; connect similar (or synonymous) concepts with "OR" You also need to use quotation marks to search complete phrases.

e.g. Mental health services AND Canada

e.g. College students OR University students

e.g. "Mental health of students"

3. Use limiters (options on the left or right side of the search results) to narrow your results list such as publication dates, peer-reviewed, and full text.

4. Be sure to read the abstracts - they will often reveal enough "clues" to tell you if the article is relevant or not.

5. If you do not find articles that interest you, look at your results. See if there are new words or new search terms that you can use that will help you improve your search.

1. Start with one or two keywords describing your topic.
2. Use the limiting options within the database to focus (i.e., refine) your results:
   • academic/peer-reviewed journals
   • date of publication (you might want more recent articles for some topics)
3. Look for subjects (aka descriptors) that can help you define your topic more narrowly.
4. Once you determine an angle or perspective you'd like to explore, try adding additional terms to your search.
5. Look for a "full text" link to view the article; if no full text link is available, try "Full Text Finder" to locate a copy of the article.
   • If no copy of the article is available online or in print, you can still request a copy from another library; there is no fee for this service, and articles take about 3 days (often fewer) to arrive.
6. Use the tools within the databases to mark, email, and print your articles:
   • You may be able to email the entire article to yourself, or at least the article information and abstract.
   • You may also be able to send yourself an MLA-formatting reference.
   • Articles in PDF format will have page numbers; articles in HTML format might not.