8. oneSEARCH is the primary search tool to look for books and articles in the Library’s collections.
Go to the big search box on the Library’s website. This is oneSEARCH. It searches print books, e-books, e-book chapters and many (but not all) of our article databases at the same.
While oneSEARCH understands natural language searches, it is good to get into the habit of setting up your searches in terms of keywords, and linking them together using AND.
For example, if your research question is something like “how has trauma been represented in literature,” then some possible searches would be:
trauma AND literature
trauma AND (literature OR fiction OR novel OR "short story")
If you're looking at traumatic themes in a specific text, like "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka, some possible searches could be:
shame AND "gregor samsa"
"the metamorphosis" AND family
fathers AND kafka
"psychological abuse" AND kafka
"self disgust" and "the metamorphosis"
Tips for searches: Don’t use full sentences or questions
Break your topic down into keywords and phrases
Link keywords or key phrases together with AND
Use OR for synonyms or alternate terms
Use quotes to search for an exact phrase
Sample results from oneSEARCH:
The first result is an ebook, the second result is an article in a scholarly (peer reviewed) journal. Note the PEER REVIEWED tag beneath the citation. Click on the “Available Online” link to get access to the full-text of the source.
To limit your search to ONLY peer reviewed articles in OneSEARCH, click on the “Peer Reviewed Journals” filter on the left-hand side of your search results. To limit your search to ONLY online sources (not print), click on the “Full Text Online” filter.
Now that you’ve found some sources using oneSEARCH, let’s go into some article databases. The Brooklyn College Library subscribes to over 400 different article databases and although oneSEARCH searches a lot of them at the same time, it doesn’t search all of them.
