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 is trauma linked to personal family relationships,” then some possible searches would be:

     trauma AND relationships

     trauma AND (family OR parent OR mother OR father)

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

To limit your search to ONLY peer reviewed articles in OneSearch, click on the “Peer Reviewed Journals” filter on the right-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.