Looking for ideas for your paper? Or background information?
Looking for quick explanation of a theory or theorist?
Looking for company history? Or demographics?
Need it fast?

Try the online database, Gale Virtual Reference Library

The Gale Virtual Reference Library is a collection of full-text encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources in every discipline taught on this campus. The collection is made up of more than 1,700 volumes of college-level reference sources, including fields of arts, biography, business, education, environment, history, law, literature, medicine, multicultural studies, nations and the world, news, political science, religion, science, social science, technology and more.

This database includes an intuitive three-box search engine that makes it simple to narrow your search and focus on the information you need. Search results are all full text and full image. They can easily be emailed, printed, downloaded or saved to your mp3 player.

The topics covered are useful for undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty.

This is a fast way to warm-up to your research and get things going.

Give it a try.

To find the Gale Virtual Reference Library; start at the Library home page, then click on Databases and enter in Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Use the "Databases" tab on our home page tabbed search box.

Are you receiving 404 server error messages when trying to access full-text articles from the library website?

We are currently experiencing some technical issues with the Basic Search tool for Articles & Books (see above image). This issue relates to the search box feature that is located on the library homepage.

There is an issue related to the retrieval of PDF documents from the search results screen. In the example above you can see that there is a direct link to retrieve the full text of this article in PDF format. However, clicking on this link will not bring up the article; instead it brings up a 404 error page.

You might experience this issue when trying to access the full-text .pdf version of articles retrieved searching via our "Basic Search" tool.

Clicking on the link for the .pdf full-text of an article, sometimes brings up this error message.

This is a temporary issue and we are working to resolve it. In the meantime, there is a simple workaround that you can use to access the full text.

When you want to retrieve the full text of an article follow these steps, or watch this brief video:

1. From the results screen click on the title of the article.
2. On the following screen, click on Full text available, not Full-Text in PDF.
3. On the next screen, click on any link that reads Full Text Online.

If you are still having issues accessing your article, please contact a librarian for assistance.

Thank you for your understanding.

Common Chemistry is a free and easy-to-use web resource that contains Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Registry Numbers for common chemical substances. This resource is maintained by CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

• This resource is particularly useful for students and faculty who need to identify the CAS Registry Number of a particular chemical substance.
• Users can search by chemical name (including synonyms) or CAS Registry Number.
• Each record for a particular chemical substance contains: the CAS Registry Number, synonyms, and chemical structure.

Didn’t find the substance you were looking for using Common Chemistry? If so, be sure to check out SciFinder, a database that includes the largest collection of substance information. SciFinder can be accessed from Pollak Library’s website.

If you need help with research, try one of our online help options. We can help demystify the search process and get you the information you need. So if you are looking for peer reviewed articles, books, demographic data, business information, websites, or anything else, visit our Ask a Librarian page.

We are available 24/7 to help you find the information you need.

Ask a Librarian

Need help with research, but can’t get to campus? We can help! The Pollak Library now offers online research appointments. Just fill out the Research Consultation request form and make sure to select “Online Appointment.” Using web-conferencing software, we will set up a virtual appointment and meet you online.

Did you know that the Pollak Library has a huge collection of full-text electronic books waiting to be discovered?

About the collection

Currently, the Pollak Library provides access to well over 50,000 eBooks through the online Catalog. Our eBook collection covers a broad range of subject areas for academic, technical, and reference books.

How to find our eBooks

There are different approaches you can take to discovering our eBooks.

• If you do a keyword or subject search in the Catalog and limit your search to internet resources only, you will access eBook titles on your searched topic, as well as other electronic sources such as government documents and ejournals.
• You can also do a keyword or subject search and add the word, “ebook”, for example, “psychology and ebook”.

Accessing eBooks is very easy.

• Select your title from the list and click the link in the orange “Connect To” box.
• In some cases however, due to the fact that the Library purchases eBooks from several different vendors, you may be asked to login after clicking the link, to access the eBook.

So, the next time you’re researching from home and need a book, remember that a wealth of information is just a Catalog search away!

Cynthia Bruns and Lin Ford contributed to this post.

About Open Access

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.
– Source: Open Access Week

Our Open Access Electronic Resources

Since it’s Open Access week, we wanted to highlight a few of our electronic resources that you might find useful. The databases below are in addition to the wealth of Open Access journals like PLoS One and e-books like those offered by the National Academies Press. Find a whole list of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

• English Short Title Catalogue (British Library): Descriptions and holdings information for all types of materials published in Great Britain and its dependencies or in English anywhere in the world from the beginnings of print to 1800 — including materials ranging from Shakespeare and Greek New Testaments to anonymous ballads, broadsides, songs, advertisements, directories, almanacs, newspapers, periodicals, and other ephemera.
• National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts Database (NCJRS) (government source): Professional criminal justice database from the US Department of Justice which indexes journal articles, government reports, books, research reports, Congressional hearings, and training materials. Topics included are crime trends, crime prevention, deterrence, juvenile justice, police, courts, punishment, sentencing and more.
• PubMed: A comprehensive index to biomedical and life sciences journals with citations to over 18 million articles back to 1948. Note: To limit to full-text articles, search PUBMED CENTRAL.
• World Bank Open Data: This site is meant to provide all users with improved access to World Bank data and to make that data easy to find and use. The World Bank provides free and open access to a comprehensive set of data about development in countries around the globe, together with other datasets cited in the data catalog.

For Faculty and Others Who Publish

Before you publish, do you check out copyright and self-archiving policies? Make sure you’re keeping control of your own copyright! A good way to do this is through the journal’s (or publisher’s) web pages, or through RoMEO.

In-depth Research consultations are now available online to CSUF students and faculty . Using web-conferencing software, we will set up a virtual appointment and meet you online.

Just fill out this form and be sure to mark the “Online Appointment” option. We will arrange the appointment within a few days. If you prefer to meet us in person, we can do that too. Just indicate your preference on the form.

When paraphrasing someone’s work and referencing the author in your text, you can have a lot of fun choosing a reporting verb to capture the author’s intention. For instance: when you are discussing a theory that some author came up with, why not use “posit”? “Johnson, based on his research into banana slugs, posits that feeding the slugs a diet of cornmeal will not make them taste like chicken.” If you are discussing some limitation an author addresses in his Discussion section, consider “concede.” “Johnson concedes that his banana slug experiment only used three slugs, and was therefore not generalizable to banana slugs worldwide.”

Helen Alexander
Graduate Learning Specialist
University Learning Center (ULC)

The University Learning Center is located on the second floor of Pollak Library North.

This service is funded by EPOCHS grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education awarded to Office of Graduate Studies.

Do you use PubMed to search for biomedical information?

LigerCat is a new, fun way to search PubMed. It is an effective tool to find relevant PubMed articles. This web application allows you to search for articles in PubMed by exploring tag clouds of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). You can then select MeSH descriptors and craft your query directly to PubMed.

In addition to the MeSH tag cloud, an interactive publication history graph is displayed. Mousing over each bar will give you the number of articles that were published in a specific year. Clicking on that bar will take you directly to the results page in PubMed.