Research Basics: Choosing the Right Search Tool

Research Basics: Choosing the Right Search Tool

For academic research, the University of Guelph Library offers three main search tools: research databases, the Omni discovery catalogue, and Google Scholar. Each has its own content and features. This overview compares their contents, their advantages and disadvantages, and their different search functions like using Boolean logic, filters, and subject indexing. Let’s begin by examining the role of research databases.

Library databases contain collections of scholarly sources - often journal articles - selected for academic quality. Many are subject-specific, focusing on a discipline and curated by experts. For example, a psychology database covers psychology journals. These databases typically include mostly peer-reviewed articles, giving them a high-quality content base.

When searching a database, some allow you to use Boolean logic, such as AND and OR, to join search terms. For more on building a search using Boolean logic, see our video on 3 Steps to Create An Effective Search Query, linked in the YouTube description.

Databases also allow filters and limits to refine results by date, publication type, language, and other criteria. Many databases use subject indexing - each item is tagged with standardized subject terms reflecting its topic. This lets you target searches to specific concepts. As one example, if you search for "heart attack", the MEDLINE database will automatically map your search to the term "myocardial infarction". If you’re interested in a detailed walkthrough of how to search databases with advanced search functionality - such as MEDLINE or PubMed - refer to our video titled ‘Finding Journal Articles Using PubMed’, which is linked in the video’s description on YouTube.
Overall, research databases offer precise search controls and reliable results. You can narrow results with multiple filters and subject terms, yielding relevant and useful results quickly. The content is typically authoritative and may be reviewed by subject matter experts in a discipline. The main disadvantage of databases is that each one has its own look and feel and subject focus, so they require some practice to use effectively. And because no single database covers every topic, you may need to search more than one to find comprehensive information for your assignment.

Omni Discovery Tool

Omni is U of G library’s online discovery tool where you can discover millions of quality academic resources including books, full text articles, unique special collections, videos, and much more from our own library plus a consortium of Ontario university libraries.

In Omni, you can use Boolean logic and basic filters — such as date, subject area, or resource type like books or articles - similarly to how you would in a research databases. For a more detailed walkthrough, check out our video ‘How to Search Omni’ - you’ll find the link in this video’s description on YouTube. Like subject-specific databases, Omni also uses subject headings to describe items; however, there may be variations in subject headings used since Omni includes items from select Ontario university libraries as well as databases with different subject headings lists. But it does allow filtering by broader categories. Because it searches across many formats and disciplines, your results may include a wide range of topics and material types.

Overall, the advantage of Omni is that it’s convenient for a broad search of library resources. It returns high-quality academic items the library owns, making it easy to find both books and articles in one place.

A disadvantage of Omni is that it only shows what the U of G library and Omni library partners have. Materials outside these collections may not appear. Also, because Omni covers such a wide range of items, some searches may still yield very large result sets that need further refinement. For example, if you search for the term cancer, you receive over 8.8 million results covering everything from clinical studies to personal narratives. To narrow this down, you could add a second keyword such as fasting. This will return sources that include both terms. To do this, use the Boolean operator AND. If you find too many articles about unrelated forms of fasting, you might refine further by using quotation marks to search for exact phrases, such as "intermittent fasting" AND "cancer". You can also apply filters to limit results by date range, resource type, or peer-reviewed content to help make your search more focused and efficient.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a free search engine for scholarly literature available on the web. It covers a very wide range of materials: journal articles, books, theses, conference papers, and more from many sources. Because it searches the open internet, it includes items that may not be in the library’s subscriptions and can include non-scholarly content which may not be suitable for inclusion in an academic paper or assignment.

Google Scholar uses Google’s search algorithm and supports basic Boolean logic. However, it tends to interpret your search terms broadly, often including synonyms automatically - which can either help by widening your results or hinder you by introducing less relevant sources. It provides few built-in filters: you can usually restrict by year or exclude patents, but you cannot easily limit results to one discipline or to peer-reviewed work. You also don't have the preliminary sorting that a more focused, discipline-specific database has.

Advantages: Google Scholar is easy and familiar to use. It requires no login and can be good for an initial, broad search. Disadvantages: Its breadth means it can return thousands of results, including irrelevant or lower-quality items. There are fewer tools to filter or sort these results, so you must carefully evaluate each source. It also cannot focus the search on a specific subject area without many extraneous hits.

Before using Google Scholar, consider watching our video ‘Connecting Google Scholar with the University of Guelph’. Although you can search without logging in, accessing full-text articles often requires institutional access. By connecting Google Scholar to the University of Guelph, you can more easily access the full texts provided by the library.

In summary, each tool serves a purpose. Subject-specific databases give the most precise, high-quality results with robust filters and indexing. Omni provides a convenient single search across the library’s books, journals, and more. Google Scholar searches widely without login, which can be useful for breadth, but with fewer controls and more variable quality. By understanding these differences, you can choose the best research tool for your research needs.

Need help? Email [library@uoguelph.ca], chat [lib.uoguelph.ca], or drop by the Ask Us desk.