To log in from off-campus, you will need your eServices username (w+student ID) and password.
OneSearch is the library's search engine for locating books, eBooks, articles, reference entries, video, and more. It is a great place to start your research; however, if the results are not what you are looking for, try a database for more precise searching. It is always recommended to use the advanced search features and filter your results.
OneSearch is exactly what its name implies: one place to search for many different kinds of sources -- including books, eBooks, scholarly articles, news articles, videos, and more!
Number: using between two and five keywords usually produces good results.
Field type: searching your keywords as an author, subject, or title will narrow your results. If your results are too broad, try adding a field type to see if your results improve.
Synonyms: different terms may be used to discuss the same topic. Separate synonyms using OR to search for results that contain either keyword. For example, "climate change" is frequently referred to as "global warming," so try searching for "climate change" OR "global warming."
Quotation marks: can be placed around keywords to search for an exact phrase. For example, climate change will produce results where both words show up anywhere in the same resource, but "climate change" will produce results where those two words are next to each other in that exact order.
Asterisks: add at the end of a word to search for all possible endings. For example, searching child* will search for resources containing child, children, childhood, etc.
Boolean Operators: use to link ideas and narrow/broaden your search.
Search bars: most advanced searches allow you to enter keywords into additional search bars. By doing this, you can search more precisely by changing the field type and boolean operators for your keywords.
Date range: unless you are doing an historical survey, start by limiting your results to the last five years. If you don't find what you need, keep going back. If you find too much, narrow it further to the last two years or even one year.
Peer reviewed: this means that an article has been reviewed for accuracy and value by experts, "peers," in that field. When doing scholarly research, you usually want to use peer reviewed articles. The easiest way to limit to only peer-reviewed articles is to select the "peer reviewed" (a.k.a. "scholarly") checkbox that can be found in the limiters of most scholarly databases.
Subject: narrow your results to a specific subject. If you don't know what subjects are used to discuss your topic, after conducting a search, locate an article that looks interesting to you and see what subjects it falls into.
Full text: selecting this option will eliminate results for which the full text is not available in the database you are currently using. However, many databases provide links to other databases that contain the full text.