Research Guides: HDFS 100: Orientation to Current Issues in Human Development and Family Studies: Home

Creating an Effective Search Strategy

Check out this 3-minute video for tips on better searching.

Tricks of the Trade: Key word searching

Would you like to know 4 quick tricks that work in most databases for key word searching? Find out how by viewing and listening to this 10 minute tutorial, which covers:

phrase searching
truncation (word stem searching)
Boolean logic (combining key words with AND and OR)
Nesting (grouping ideas)

Tricks of the Trade

Is This Article Scholarly?

This 1.5 minute video goes over quick tips for determinig if an article is "scholarly" or "popular."

Welcome!

This page been tailored for students taking HDFS 100 and includes links and tips for finding and citing sources.

Finding Articles

Use the research databases below to find sholarly articles. Each database has a different focus (child development, education, etc.), so read the brief descriptions below before you search, to find the most relevant one(s) for your research topic.

Child Development and Adolescent Studies
Indexes literature on the growth and development of children through the age of 21. Covers journal articles, book reviews, technical reports, book chapters, and dissertations.
ERIC (EBSCO interface)
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Recommended version for Purdue users.

Bibliographic database sponsored by the US Department of Education, is the premier source for education-related research, documents, and journal articles. Access via the EBSCO interface will link to full-text articles.
PsycINFO
This database contains more than one million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology. It also includes information about the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 1,700 periodicals in over 35 languages.
Social Sciences Full Text
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Social Sciences Full Text provides access to a wide assortment of the most important English-language journals published in the U.S. and elsewhere with full text and page images from scores of key publications, plus abstracting and indexing of hundreds of others.

Search Google Scholar

If you're off-campus, click Off Campus Access to e-Resources for info on how to link to full-text (full articles) online through Purdue Libraries.

Tips for Writing & Citing

APA Formatting & Style
A thorough overview of APA style. Check out the links on the left side of the page for examples on citing different kinds of sources.
APA FAQ
How to avoid plagiarism
Tips on how to summarize, paraphrase, and quote sources without plagiarizing.
Review Articles vs. Original Research
The examples are from Biology, but they're good. Use these tips to make sure you're selecting *original research* articles, NOT review articles.