Use the left menu to navigate your way through this guide.
If you need help:
Omni is the new academic search tool that locates your research material quickly and easily. Find Omni at the top of all our library webpages, or use the links below.
Database Trials: Explore New Resources
Trent University is pleased to offer trial access to three academic resources. These prospective resources provide rich content for research and study in a variety of fields. Take advantage of limited-time access to explore and provide feedback on their usefulness.
To provide user feedback on these products, please contact your discipline specific Learning & Liaison Librarian.
De Gruyter eBooks and eJournals
Trial subscription available from September 25 to December 31, 2024.
De Gruyter eBooks and De Gruyter eJournals offer a comprehensive collection of high-quality academic content across a wide range of disciplines. With a focus on humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and law, De Gruyter provides access to scholarly resources that support in-depth research and learning.
Key Features:
Brill eBooks and eJournals
Trial subscription available from September 25 to December 31, 2024.
Brill eBooks and Brill eJournals provide access to a collection of academic publications, renowned for their focus on the humanities, social sciences, international law, and religious studies. Brill is one of the oldest academic publishers and is highly regarded for its extensive and specialized content.
Key Features:
Web of Science Research Assistant (COMING SOON)
Trial subscription will be available for the month of November 2024.
The Web of Science Research Assistant is a powerful tool designed to help researchers streamline their workflow and enhance their research efficiency. By leveraging Web of Science's vast database of academic publications, the Research Assistant provides personalized recommendations, literature search optimization, and citation management features.
Key Features:
The Web of Science Research Assistant is ideal for students, academics, and researchers who want to save time and stay organized while conducting literature reviews and building comprehensive research projects.
This 9-minute video walks you through the process of finding Omni, signing in, searching, limiting results, getting the full text, and saving items for later. It's 9 minutes well spent!
Library resources are carefully reviewed and chosen by librarians for things like reliability, relevance, and value.
Use the library to:
(Above content adapted from Washtenaw Community College)
Information found on Google does not go through a consistent review process. Anyone can publish to the web, which makes it hard to determine credibility, relevance and value. You can also be asked to pay for information (like newspaper, magazine, and journal articles) you find using Google. Read more about publishing and Google here.
Use Google or another search engine:
(Above content adapted from Washtenaw Community College)
There's no right or wrong answer to this question. Google is an excellent search engine and the web is full of useful information. What's important is your ability to distinguish appropriate sources from inappropriate sources, since the library isn't doing any sorting for you when you're on the web.
It's also important that you know how and when to put Google aside and use the scholarly indexes that our library pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for each year. This is where the majority of the best research material can be found, and if you graduate from University without knowing how to use them, you've done yourself a true injustice that will probably cost you down the road.
Google Scholar Google created Google Scholar to locate scholarly information on the web. To do this, they receive permission from some scholarly publishers to allow their crawlers into databases, to gather information. The crawlers report back on what they've found and provide citation information. Google doesn't tell you which publishers it searches or what is left out, so you don't know where you're searching.
As a Google Scholar user, you can search the site, read the citations and click on the links to articles.
We've arranged to have Trent University added as an institution on the Google Scholar site, so that you can access many articles online through their search engine, whether you are on campus or not.
To activate it:
Next, set your library affiliation:
The screen looks like this:
If you save these settings, they should be there the next time you go to the site, but if not, just do the same again.
Now, when you search, your results will include links to Trent resources.
If you're off-campus, you'll be asked to login to identify yourself as a valid Trent user. When you search Google Scholar with the Library Links enabled, you can access any article our library has subscribed to. You will not, however, get free access to articles that our library does not already receive online. Use Interlibrary Loan to request these.