LB 133 Fall 2025 (Fink): Home

The first thing to do if you're looking for something in the library is to search from the library homepage. You can access the website at www.lib.msu.edu. You may choose to search all the kinds of materials that the library has, or you can use the dropdown menu to choose a specific type (for example, if you need a movie or music, you would choose "Books and Media"). To see tutorial videos on using the website, click the links below. To get help, either with the website or another library question, you can also click "Ask Us" to the right of the search box to chat with a librarian.

Note: If you've already found an article using Google or Google Scholar, you can copy and paste the title into the library search box to see if we have it in full text. If we don't, you can also request the article via interlibrary loan. If you're searching outside the library, you may reach screens that tell you you'll have to pay for an article, but as a member of MSU, you should never have to do that!

• Journal: a periodical. You can think about it as a magazine that publishes scientific research. Journals usually publish one issue every month. 12 issues (one year) is called a volume.
• Database: a database is like a search engine that searches only a specific set of journals. The database is not a journal itself; it just searches them. Some databases also search other kinds of sources, including newspapers, government documents, popular magazines, and sometimes videos.Databases are mostly proprietary. You can only use the ones that the MSU library subscribes to.
• Library Website: Searches everything the library owns or subscribed to, on any topic. Databases usually focus on one narrower topic.
• Gray Literature: Can be published by a government agency or a non-governmental organization (NGO). Considered reliable even though they are not peer-reviewed. They are mostly compilations of statistics (they wouldn't be published in an academic journal because there is no original research question, but the statistics are considered reliable).
• Abstract: The first part of an article, which is a summary. Even if you're not seeing full-text, you'll usually see an abstract.
• Some government websites also have scholarly literature on them. If you see something that says it's been published in a journal, that's probably scientific research. Something that's not published in a journal, or that's called a "report," is usually gray literature.
• Full-text means that the library has a subscription to the journal you're looking at. You'll see it if you're searching through the library website or in a database. If you try to download an article from Google, you'll often be asked to pay for it (which you shouldn't have to do! MSU subscribes to most English-language journals that you'll come across.)