Skip to Main Content

Knowledge for Freedom - KFF: Introduction to Research

This guide was created to support the information needs and library instruction links for the students who are part of the Knowledge for Freedom program at TU.

TU Databases

"Academic Search Complete is the world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 9,810 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc." -- EBSCO

Links to the full list of research databases offered at McFarlin.

"This database offers full-text articles for journals published by the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association and Hogrefe & Huber. The database includes all material from the print journals. Many titles go back to volume 1, issue 1." -- ProQuest

JSTOR provides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history and other fields of the humanities and social sciences.

ScienceDirect is a major scientific database offering access to a large number peer-reviewed journal articles. It is part of Elsevier, the world's largest scientific, technical and medical publisher.

"Scopus covers more than 24,000 peer-reviewed journals in science, technology, medicine and social sciences from over 5,000 international publishers." Scopus includes "coverage of: Open Access journals, Conference Proceedings, Trade Publications and Book Series." -- Elsevier

Tulsa City-County Library

All TPS students have a free library card from TCCL. You can use this for academic and career research!

To access your account, REMEMBER:

  • your lunch number = library card number
  • your password = your birth year

Citing Sources

  • ZoteroBib
    • ZoteroBib helps you build a bibliography instantly from any computer or device, without creating an account or installing any software.

Research Tips

The Information Lifecycle

Thinking Critically About Information

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a version of the Google search engine that searches the web for scholarly publications (primarily articles and books). 

Important note: Articles found through Google Scholar are not guaranteed to be peer-reviewed. Additionally, Google Scholar cannot access proprietary databases such as those in EBSCOhost.

Google provides links to the articles it finds, usually on the publisher's website.  You will be able to access the full text of the article if:

  1. the article is freely available (i.e. in the public domain or open access)
  2. McFarlin Library subscribes to the journal online and you are on the TU campus while using Google Scholar

You may not be able to access the full text through Scholar if:

  1. McFarlin Library does not subscribe to the journal online and it is not freely available
  2. McFarlin subscribes to the journal online and you are off-campus
  3. McFarlin has access to the journal online through a proprietary database (such as EBSCOhost, ProQuest, Gale, etc.)

When you find a source in Google Scholar, you must check to see if the journal article is scholarly, or peer reviewed. To do this you will need to copy the name of the article or journal in the citation. See below

Once you have the name of the article, you can search for the article in Discovery to confirm the article is scholarly, as seen below.

If you want to see if an entire journal has peer-review status, you can search for the journal title in our journal list. See below.