College of Education: Library and Research Resources

Begin your library research process by going broad and exploring the scholarly conversation around your topic instead of narrowing down too fast. You can use Google Scholar, Usearch the library catalog, and books to get a broader perspective on your topic. Links on this page will get you started.

If you would like to explore more detailed information about the 5 strategies outlined in the left navigation menu, use this open Canvas course that contains additional links and tutorials.

Google Scholar is a great place to start your research. Scholar has the ease of Google but limits a search to more scholarly resources. It can be linked to the library databases so that you can discover resources we have at the U of U library directly from within Google Scholar while also discovering government reports, documents from Europe, Asia and Australia as well

To link Google Scholar to our Marriott Library resources,:

1. Click on the Settings link (wheel) at the top of the page.

2. Click on Library Links on the left navigation menu and type University of Utah to the search box and search, then select the Get it at the UU option, and click save Button. These settings will stay on your computer until you clean out your cache. Now you will see the Get at the UU link on the right side of the source if Utah has that in any of our databases.

4. After you search you will see a new left hand navigation menu appear.

• You can limit by year
• You can click the save link and make a list of sources in own library if logged into Google
• Sort by date or relevance

5. Now do a search using keywords to find scholarly articles. You will see under the search item listing, cited by #, related articles these may also be possible articles to check out. Take note of journal names, keywords, author names, you can use those to limit by when searching later

The Get it at the UU link that appears to the right of the sources will take you directly into the library database. This is helpful if you are not sure what database to use.

Use Google Scholar to:

• Scan for additional keywords you can use to search
• See who has cited articles and books
• Link out to author Google Scholar profiles (if there name is underlined)
• Get clues about what library databases might be good places to start searching in the library resources
• Take note about what journals are publishing articles around your topic

Usearch (The Library Catalog)
Usearch is another broad tool you can use to get a sense of the scope of the topic you are researching. Use Usearch to find online and physical books as well as journals, magazines and newspapers. You can also find specific information on the main Marriott Library website such as Interlibrary Loan, how to schedule a group room and how to contact the Knowledge Commons. The Usearch catalog will identify the location of a book and indicate whether or not the book is checked out. For access to the full text of online books and articles in Usearch make sure you are authenticated (see Off Campus Access Information).

Use USearch to:

• Find books, both print and electronic, government documents, audio-visual materials, manuscripts, maps, software and electronic media.
• FInd articles from some of the Marriott Library's research databases.
• Find the titles of journals or magazines the library subscribes to, but not individual articles within each magazine or journal.
• Search by author, title, subject, keywords, date, or ISBN/ISSN.

It is important to remember that for a more comprehensive article search with advanced searching capability, you should use the databases tab to find all articles (Strategy #2 - Digging Deeper). 

WorldCat
A combined catalog of over 14,000 libraries from around the world listing over 40,000,000 items. You can place an Interlibrary Loan request for items found in other libraries while online. The physical book will be sent here while articles will be sent directly to you in an email as a PDF file.

The following are collections of e-books accessible through Usearch, the UU Libraries Catalog. Books are a great resource when beginning your research. When you find a book of interest:

• Look for the subject terms and keywords on the book abstract catalog page to find similar resources
• Explore the Table of Contents (TOC) to see what topics are being covered in the book
• Read the Introductory chapters to get a broad sense of the topic

The collections listed below will get you started, but they are not comprehensive. Use this Electronic Books Library Guide for tips on using and troubleshooting e-books.

EBSCO E-Books Provides access to a collection of e-books that users can browse or read online or download to read offline. Browsing is freely available; to read or download a book you need to set up a personal account within NetLibrary.

Proquest Ebooks Central .  Previously known as Ebrary and Ebook Library (EBL), Provides access to a catalog of over 40,000 ebooks, and includes a number of sub-collections such as Academic Complete, which contains a multidisciplinary library of more than 52,000 titles in a variety of subjects.

Gutenberg-e  Provides digital versions of Gutenberg-e prize winning books in history, these e-books offer extensive documentation, hyperlinks to supplementary literature, images, music, video, and links to related web sites. A joint project of the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press

HathiTrust is large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries which includes content digitized via the Google Books project and Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries