Books are excellent places to look for background information. When searching for books in OneSearch, focus your search by searching the word career and then adding the career you are looking for, for example, engineer, dentistry, paralegal, nursing. A search using the keywords dentistry and career, for example, will result in books and articles that focus specifically on your career. If you truncate a word such as dentist* with an asterisk you might get even more results because your search will look for the word dentist or dentistry
Use "quotation marks" to keep your keywords side-by-side as an exact phrase, for example, "career choices"
Use the *asterisk as a wild card to give you the same stem with any ending, for example, therap* will give you the words therapy, therapies, therapist, therapeutic and any other word that has the root therap. Try to get in the habit of truncating any single word to bring up singular and plural. Example: career*
Use (parentheses) to nest, or combine similar keywords with the connectors OR, AND, NOT, for example, (career* or employment* or job*)
Another example would be: (career* or employment*) and name of career
There were more than 74,000 results for the search above, dentist* AND career. That is because our search engine has looked through a number of sources that are available at or through Sacramento City College.
If you take a look to the left of your search results, you will see that you can narrow by publication date.
You can also narrow by resource type. Are you looking only for magazine articles? Newspapers? Books? Be sure to click on "Show More" for additional resources. As you can see, there are even videos on your topic.
If your instructor has said that you need to have peer-reviewed articles, you should select "Show only Scholarly Journals," located right above the date selector.