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Course & Subject Guides

Research Process Demystified @ Pitt

A guide for students beginning the research paper and project process.

Searching Techniques

Phrase Searching - PittCat allows for phrase searching with the use of “  “. For example, the search "climate change" will find items with the phrase climate change in them.

Wildcard and Truncation – You can use wildcards (* and ?) symbols to search PittCat.

Advanced Searching - Check the Advanced Search for more tips and techniques to enhance your search, including Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT). Note: Boolean Operators must be entered in all uppercase/capital letters.

Databases by Subject

Search: Conduct multiple searches in relevant resource

PittCat

PittCat PittCat is the main searching tool for all of the materials owned by the University Library System (ULS), including articles, books, ebooks, journal articles, ejournals, audio and video, digital images, government documents, microfilm and movies.

Databases

A database is an online collection of articles that you can search by topic or keyword.  Databases are great sources for articles because much of the material in ULS databases is the high quality, scholarly research information that most professors want.  Most of our databases offer links to the full text of articles. These databases are excellent starting points for your research because they have something on every subject: