The Perch

• The Perch is one of the best places to find articles from popular sources, both online and in person! Physically, you can flip through the library's many magazines and newspapers here, on the first floor of the Main Library straight ahead after walking through the gates at the information desk. Online, links to The Perch's resources are below.
• Magazines - Magazines are some of the best places to find articles from popular sources, because they usually have a consistent point of view.
• Newspapers and Reviews - These are other great places to find articles from popular sources. These are especially good for seeing different/regional opinions on something as time passes, by for example comparing coverage of an event on the day that it happened versus coverage from a week/month/year/etc. later.

InfoHawk+

• InfoHawk+, our library catalog, actually searches through SOME, BUT NOT ALL of our databases whenever you run a search in it. Because it only searches through SOME of our databases, it doesn't tell you everything we might have on a topic, but it can give you a good quick survey of what might be out there, and other potential words or terminology to use in your searching.

Google

• Google is a surprisingly good way to find non-scholarly articles as well. You can always just google your topic as you would anything else, but there are also more specific ways to search that you can learn more about below.
• Search For Exact Phrase - you can tell Google, or any database really, to search for a phrase exactly as you've typed it in by using quotation marks around your search term like so: "search term"
  • For example: "chocolate cake" (115,000,000 results that specifically include the words "chocolate cake") vs chocolate cake (1,470,000,000 results that might include other things like chocolate mousse cake, chocolate ice cream cake, red velvet chocolate cake, etc., that you might not be looking for)
• Search Within Specific Website - you can tell Google to look through just one site by typing into the search box: "searchterm" site:website.com
  • For example: "cookies" site:nytimes.com
• NOTE: When using Google to find articles, you might reach websites that have paywalls, which might not let you look at multiple articles. If you do reach a paywall, please look through our library resources here at The Perch or in InfoHawk+ to see if we have a copy of the article that the library has already paid for so that you can access it!
  • Trying searching for the name of the article, the author of the article, or the publication the article was in