Business Law and Ethics Assignment - Columbus: Databases

Academic Search Premier (ASP) is a multidisciplinary database used by researchers at all levels-from high school students to university professors.  ASP is just one in a suite of databases developed and produced by the company EBSCO and can be viewed as a great "general purpose" academic article database.  ASP features full-text access to articles from thousands of peer-reviewed, discipline-specific academic journals.  Here you will find articles and information from various academic disciplines and is a great place to go for accurate, reliable scholarly sources.

To give you a brief introduction to searching the database, lets say that you access the database and initially type in "gay marriage" and see what results you get.  You should get around 8,977 thousand articles.  To narrow down your results, on the left hand side of the page there are small boxes under "Limit Too" that you can check off that will limit the articles to full text and scholarly peer reviewed. You will get less results but everything you find should be something you can use.  After doing all of this your results should be narrowed down to 458 articles.  That is still quite a bit to sort through, to narrow it down further leave "gay marriage" in your search bar but now type in AND "discrimination." If you do this you should now have 37 results. You will get more articles that pertain to your research question this way.  Don't be afraid to play around with your wording, even typing them in a different order can yield different results.

"Opposing Viewpoints in Context is the premier online resource covering today’s hottest social issues, from Offshore Drilling to Climate Change, Health Care to Immigration.Opposing Viewpoints in Context helps students research, analyze and organize a broad variety of data for conducting research, completing writing assignments, preparing for debates, creating presentations and more.

In addition to the engaging, streamlined interface and media-rich topic pages, the product's unprecedented collection of content and curriculum-focused tools that help students explore issues from all perspectives include:

• Pro/con viewpoint essays
• Topic overviews
• More than 300 primary source documents
• Biographies of social activists and reformers
• Court-case overviews
• Periodical articles
• Statistical tables, charts and graphs
• Images and a link to Google Image Search
• Podcasts, including weekly presidential addresses and premier NPR programs
• A national and state curriculum standards search, correlated to the content that allows educators to quickly identify material by grade and discipline"

Using this database is very similar to using a search engine like Google.  Simply type in your research question "gay marriage, or "gay marriage equality," or "gay marriage discrimination." You should get lots of results just from these few keywords.  No matter what you choose to search for you should get results.  On opposing viewpoints you should find resources to academic journals, magazines, newspapers, and even to videos.