An everything search is a great way to get a broad overview of a topic and potentially find additional search terms to make note of and use in additional searching.
When you perform an everything search, you’re searching hundreds of millions of records from publishers and content aggregators; the number of records is constantly growing as additional data sources are added, so it is an incredibly powerful tool and casts a very large net when you search it for results. Although it is very powerful, it's important to view an everything search as one tool in your toolbox for finding journal articles as it won't find everything that's available in databases.
Results in an everything search include books, eBooks, journal articles, open source resources, dissertations, conference proceedings, book reviews, newspaper articles, etc.
Go to the library catalogue. When you start typing your topic or search term in the search bar, a drop-down menu will appear. Select the everything option to search for a variety of resources on the topic:
Alternatively, use the Advanced Search area to enter multiple search terms in different fields.
This search retrieves over 13,000 results, far more than the catalogue search! On the search results page, take a look at the left-hand menu where you can see the various resource types represented. You can select these to look at only certain types of resources:
There are other filters worth exploring as well.
You may want to select Peer-reviewed Journals if your instructor has required that your sources need to be peer reviewed, or input a "from" date in Publication Date if your instructor has required that your sources need to be recent:
The Subject list can be a handy place to look for additional search terms that appear in the results; these might also be relevant to your research topic:
Be sure to check out the Databases list to see which databases these results are retrieved from; you may want to consider doing more targeted searching in one of these databases, since databases offer even more options for refining search results.
Once you've found a resource you want to view in more detail, you can click the green access links on the results page to access it:
Alternatively, click on the title and scroll down to the View Online section, as there may be multiple options for finding the full text online:
If you're looking for an article, perform an Advanced Search, paste the title of the article into the search box, select the Title option in the drop-down menu, and click Search:
After you perform your search, click the green Read Online or Full text available links to bring you to the full text in one of the library's databases or through an open source platform:
If these links don't bring you to the full text, try searching Google Scholar for the full text or submitting an interlibrary loan request.