One of the main points of an exploratory essay is to get you accustomed to doing research.
There are many avenues available to you of doing research, but the best sources are scholarly sources. Therefore, you’re probably not going to find them by doing a Google search. The best scholarly sources are in academic journals and are peer-
Peer Reviewed: Scholarly articles that have been reviewed and accepted by a colleague’s peers reviewed. This means that scholar has put a great deal of time and work into an article, and the article is reviewed by others in their field before being published. Because of the level of professionalism and reliability, these articles are the kind of works you should use for research. Luckily, Purdue
University Calumet has search engines specifically for scholarly work. It’s a little tricky to get to, but here is how you do it.
1.
First, go to www.purduecal.edu
. Then, rest your cursor over “Start Here” and click on the library.

2.
That will take you to the library home page. There, click on the “List of Databases” tab.
Tip: Academic Search Premier has many resources that English 100 students find relevant to their research. It is a great place to start.
Which database you choose will depend on the topic your writing about. However, some very good databases that contain resources on a wide variety of topics are INSPIRE,
Academic Search Premier, and Omni Fulltext Mega. Use a few different databases to find one that you like, and to get many different results.

3.
When you’re on a database, there are a few things you should do to make sure you’re getting scholarly sources. For example, on INSPIRE, click “Advanced Search.”
From there, click again on the “Advanced Search” tab; also click the “Full-Text Only” box, and in the category section, click the “Academic” box. This will ensure that you only bring up articles to which you can read the full document, and your search will bring up only academic, peer-reviewed articles:


Don’t be discouraged if your first search or even your first few searches don’t bring up any results that you can use. Play around with search terms. Google the topic you are researching to get an idea of related words and plug those in.
 Put quotation marks around a specific phrase you are looking for. For example, typing in “War of the Roses” will ensure you get content about the War of the
Roses, rather than articles and wars and articles about roses, separately.
 Make use of Boolean operators. You will see the Boolean operators in the drop-down box with the word selection “And” “Not” and “Or.” So for example, you can search: o “Feminism” And “Anarchy” to get
Tip: Make sure to save articles you find that you think you may use. Either save them in PDF format to your flash drive, print them, or bookmark them for future use. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to find a perfect article you found previously.
articles containing both those words o “Shakespeare” Not “Anti-Semitism” to get articles about Shakespeare, but specifically not articles about Anti-Semitism in Shakespeare’s plays. o “Higher Education” Or “College” because these are usually synonymous, so you’ll get articles with either phrase/word.
 If you are writing a paper that is dependent upon recent research (especially anything in the sciences) use the publication date option to bring up only recently published articles.
Not all databases are exactly like Inspire, but with these basics, you should be able to navigate any scholarly database. Using scholarly journals will help you avoid using overly biased articles, and will provide you with only reliable, thoroughly researched academic work.