Note what time period the database covers and whether it offers citations, abstracts, or full-text. Consult the database help screens if you are unfamiliar with the database features. Enter your search terms into the search box. If your search is successful, your results will be displayed. If no results are produced, try variant search terms or try broadening your search.
Some databases provide an online thesaurus of subject words or headings.
Your results will consist of a list of records that includes pertinent information about the article. The record may also contain an abstract or the full-text of the article and links to other searchable fields, such as subject or author. Read and evaluate the information provided in each record to see if it is valuable to your research. If the full-text of the article was not available online, you will now need to use the citations you found to locate the actual periodical articles in the main or architecture library. If you need help using any database, please see the reference librarian .