[MUSIC] There are a range of places that you can find information for assignments at university. For most students, your starting point would be a quick and dirty search on a giant search engine like Google. But if you need to start getting more precise information, more accurate information, university libraries generally have an aggregated search function. And you can get even more fine-grained than that by looking at university databases, which give you access to academic journals around the world. [MUSIC] So the more precise you get with a search for information, the more reliable and accurate that data can be. And this is why it's really important to consider a range of sources when you're doing a search. So academic journal databases give you access to peer-reviewed, published articles which explain how they got their evidence. What are the assumptions underlying their argument? And that's really important detailed information. Whereas if you turn to a major search engine, you're probably not going to get that fine grain of information. And you may find that some of it's inaccurate or outright untrue. [MUSIC] To understand which sources of information are the most useful at university, it really depends on what it is you're looking for in the first place, obviously. So if you're an education student, you might find that a database like Taylor & Francis or JSTOR is quite useful to you. If you're a science student, you might turn to Web of Science or Scopus. So there are a range of university databases that you can turn to. The library's aggregated search function can give you a quick overview of a subject area. Or if you're looking for something more general, or maybe you want more of a reference to popular culture, you can turn to a search engine like Google or YouTube or any of those sorts of providers. [MUSIC] There's two main differences that I can think of when you're searching for information from different sources. The first criteria is the quality of the information you're finding. The university pays for access to journal databases, so you have really high quality information in there. And that's quite important if you need to make a very accurate, precise argument. But at the same time, you have access to services like Google or YouTube or something, which gives you a much broader range of information, but it's not necessarily as accurate. And the other thing to consider is, what sort of information are you looking for? Not just in terms of accuracy. Are you looking for something based on science, on literature, on social sciences? Or are you looking for some primary information, maybe from history? And if that's the case, you might find it actually works better for you to turn to more public databases. [MUSIC] Depending on the source that you're turning to, there are two ways of using it efficiently. If you're using one of the databases, Boolean searching, which is a form of search logic that helps you narrow down the results that you're getting, is a really powerful tool to use. The other thing to consider are the key words that you find in your essay question or in any articles that you're looking up. And that can really help you as you're looking through any database or any search engine. [MUSIC]