This guide will help you find books, articles, websites and other information sources you'll need for research assignments in your program.

This guide also provides some research tips, strategies and tools. If you need more help finding, using, or evaluating information sources, click on Research Help on the right to contact your Subject Librarian.

You can search our article databases (collections of journal, newspaper and magazine articles). If the full text of the article is not in the database, click on the "Look for a Copy" or "Find Full Text" link.

Try to break down your topic into the main concepts.

For example:    1. Client     2. Issue     3. Intervention

Brainstorm to think of synonyms, broader terms and narrower terms to describe each of these concepts.

Example: You are developing an intervention plan for an adolescent female client with problematic alcohol and drug use. You are considering referring them to a group therapy program.

Your database search might look like this:

adolescen* AND "substance abuse" AND (therapy OR treatment)

^ Note: asterisks (*) search for different endings of words, and quotations marks (" ") search for phrases of two or more words.^

If your first search doesn't get good results, try substituting one or more of the keywords with some of the synonyms you have found from brainstorming or the ones you've seen in used in articles.

While you are a student at MRU, you never need to pay to access an article. Sometimes you will come across articles in Google that will not allow you to access the full text - if that happens, here are your options:

- Copy the title of the article and paste it into LibrarySearch. If the article is covered by our subscriptions, a link will be provided to the full text.

- If we don't have the article in our collection, you can request a copy of the article for free using our Interlibrary Loan service.

If you are using Google Scholar at home, you will have to adjust the settings to see which articles are available full text through MRU library.

Choose Settings

Select Library Links. In the search box, search for Mount Royal. Be sure to hit save!

Articles that we paid for access to will be flagged in your search results