1. Starting your search
Say that you are given a topic:
Define how Harry Potter has changed teaching, using scholarly articles.
How would you start looking for articles?
For effective searching, try to pull out the major nouns in the prompt Harry Potter teaching
you’ve been given. Search with these first.
Next, try to make words as simple or as close to the root word as Harry Potter teach
possible—from “shapes” or “shaping” into “shape”. Try the search again.
Try using a wildcard symbol, *, for words that could have multiple Harry Potter teach*
endings— stor* will bring up both “story” and “stories”, and “story*” will
bring up “storybook” and “storytime”.
Harry potter education,
If you can’t find anything with your modified words, try looking for Harry Potter learning,
similar, related words— “global” instead of “universal” or “no-cost” JK Rowling learning
instead of “free”
With these searching tips in mind, let’s look at what Academic Search
Premier looks like when searching for articles.

2. This search gave
us 25 results,
which means it
was specific
enough to be
effective. Try to
aim for between
1 and 100 results
for a manageable
search.
This article is Make sure to check off
available in full-text the “scholarly (peer
PDF from this reviewed) journals”
database, so just button if you want to
clicking on this find articles you can
button will take you cite in your papers.
to the full article.
You can also choose to
search for full text
articles, which means
searching only those
This article was found whose full text is stored
by the database, but it on Academic Search
isn’t stored in it. Premier. This will limit
Clicking this button your results, but it can
will search the save time spent
school’s catalog for searching other
the article. Turn the databases.
page for what that
search looks like.

3. This is what clicking the “search for full text
in other databases” in Academic Search
Premier will bring you to. If the article is
available in another database, then there
will be links in the area circled. Clicking on
the link marked “article” will take you
straight to the article you searched for. If
you’d like to browse articles in the same
journal, click the “journal” link. If you’d like
to just explore the new database, click
“database name”.
If it’s not available in the library, you can
request a photocopy of the article from
another library using this link.

4. You will be given a topic by your instructor.
You will have to search for articles about this topic in Academic Search
Premier.
What words will you use to search? What are some synonyms of the words you want to
use?
How many articles did you find that were scholarly? How many did you find that were
not scholarly?
Did you find something within Academic Search Premier, or was it stored in another
database?