It would be extremely time consuming to browse or page through hundreds of individual journals to locate articles on a specific topic. This is why we use databases. Databases are collections of journals, often in a specific subject area, which you can use to locate articles in thousands of journals at one time
Here are some search tips to remember when searching the databases.
1. Be sure to mark the "peer reviewed" or "scholarly" limit when searching for peer reviewed articles.
2. Use quotation marks around phrases (e.g. "therapeutic recreation", "vocational rehabilitation")
3. Use the word "AND" between different concepts.
4. Use the word "OR" between similar concepts, (e.g. teens OR teenagers OR juveniles OR adolescents)
5. Common truncation symbols in the databases are the asterisk symbol * or question mark ?. Using this will allow you to search for various forms of the word in one step. For example, strateg* will search for strategy, strategies, strategize, and strategic.
Here are some example searches: