Research Fundamentals: Home

• Express your research topic in the form of a statement or a question and identify pertinent keywords
• Determine the type and amount of information you need

• Select the appropriate research tools.

• Search the research databases effectively to retrieve relevant results

• Evaluate search results and refine your search if necessary

• Get the full text of the materials you need

• Understand the legal and ethical issues involved in use of the materials you have collected

• Cite your sources

Below is a small group of selected interdisciplinary databases that cover a variety of disciplines at Northeastern. Explore this and other research subject guides to discover more subject specific databases. View the complete list of databases here.

Engineering Village - A comprehensive interdisciplinary engineering database. Contains over 9 million records, and references to over 5000 international sources, including journals, conferences and trade publications, 1969 to present.

JSTOR -  Large, interdisciplinary collection of journal articles, additional in-depth, scholarly treatment of specific works or themes in that author's output, useful for articles in sociological disciplines not covered by MLA Bibliography. 

ScholarOneSearch - ScholarOneSearch provides a simple, one-stop searching for books and e-books, e-journals, videos, articles, digital media, and more. Search Northeastern collections and global resources, with many items available in full text online. 

Statista -  Data on over 60,000 topics from over 18,000 sources categorized into 21 market sectors. Statista provides access to quantitative data on media, business, finance, politics, and a wide variety of other areas of interest or markets. 

Web of Science -  Web of Science indexes over 11,000 scholarly journals in the sciences (1975-present). Web of Science's strength is in its interdisciplinary focus and its ability to perform citation searching.

Web search engines such as Google are convenient for quickly finding information that is freely available online. 

But:

• Much of the most valuable and important material is not free.  
• Web search engines offer limited search options.

Library databases:

• Offer flexible search options that help you to quickly identify the best content on your topic. 

• Link to the full text or to options for quickly obtaining the full text at no cost.

• Help you to manage your content and cite it properly.