If you have been given a topic to write about, the first step is to think about what words or phrases convey what you want your articles to cover --- for example, if we are looking for articles about the effect of time management on employee performance, we need to think of what words or phrases would tell the database what we need our articles to cover.

For this search we might first try "time management" "employee performance" "effects"

It is good to also think of alternative phrases (synonyms) just in case what we have selected doesn't give us the results we want.

Here we have entered the search terms we chose.

Once we have performed our search, we can look at the results to determine if the terms we used gave us the information we need.

With the citation, you have all the information needed to cite this article in your paper. Article title, authors, journal title, volume/issue and page number are important parts for citing works. For articles from academic journals, you may also see information for cited references (articles the author used in his work) along with the times the article has been cited (used by others in their work). You will not necessarily see this information with every scholarly article. You will also see the full text icons which let you know the full text is available for this article.

Click on the title of the article to open the record for that article. Here you find the full record for this article. Located to the left are any full text indicators.

The other helpful tool you will find is the BU InfoLinks button. This button allows you to look for other sources of the article -- in other databases, in the library holdings or making requests through Interlibrary Loan.

Located on the right side of the record are more tools.

Here you will see tools that will allow you to do the following:

• email articles to yourself or others
• see a citation for the article
• Create notes
• Print articles
• Add article to folder

Another handy tool is the folder which allows you to save articles as you review your results. Once finished, You can print or email articles in one batch.

To the right of each citation, you will see the folder icon. By clicking on this, you can add an article to your folder. You can review articles and add the ones you might use to your folder. Once done, look for the folder icon in the blue tool bar at the top of the screen. This is where you go to print or email the articles you have saved.

Here we have done a search for"Information systems" "employee performance" and need our articles to be found in the MIS Quarterly.

We have entered our search terms in the boxes. The one change is that for the "MIS Quarterly" box, we have changed the box across from it to "SO Publication Name". This tells the database to look for MIS Quarterly as a publication and not as a topic.

If we look at our results, we see that all the articles are ones from our selected journal, MIS Quarterly

A couple of things to keep in mind when doing a search such as this one:

• Not every journal will have articles on every topic
• Try different words or phrases if you don't succeed on the first search

We can use the article title (or a portion of the title) and the author's last name to search for our article.

Here we have entered a portion of the title in the first box, then we changed the box across from it to read "Title". Next we typed the author's last name in the second search box and changed the box across from it to read "Author".

Here we have the article we are looking for "Transformational leadership as a mediator between emotional intelligence and team outcomes"

We can also search using only the article title. The downside to this method is having to sort through the results that you obtain. Unless this is a unique title, you may end up with more articles that you might want. However, when all else fails, it is a method worth trying.

You can use the "Publication" search to look for journals that might be included in the database. Click on the "Publication" link at the top of the search page.

Next, type the journal title in the Browse box and click on the Browse button.

Clicking on the journal title will take you to the record for the journal.

Here you will see the time span for our coverage in this title and the years of coverage for full text. Located in the right side of the page is the list of years included in our access to this journal. This functions like the Table of Contents -- click on the year and issue to see articles included in that particular issue.