Getting Started at the Library

GALILEO is the University System of Georgia's online library portal to authoritative, subscription-only information from trade journals, scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, and more that isn’t available through free search engines or internet directories.

The quickest way to search GALILEO is by using the Discover Search on the homepage (and also embedded on this page). This search compiles the hundreds of databases collected by GALILEO, and it searches most, but not all, of them at once.

Why use the Discover tool?

• It allows you to perform quick, multi-disciplinary searches.
• It returns a wide variety of results in many formats, such as books, ebooks, scholarly articles, news clips and articles, images, encyclopedia entries, and more.
• It searches the full text of the available resources for your search term.
• Similar to GILFind, it also searches Gordon Library's catalog.
  • (We still recommend using GILFind if you are looking for specific physical materials at the library, but if you are conducting research through GALILEO, this is a helpful feature that informs you if we have an item on our shelves that may fit your search criteria.)
• You can easily apply filters and use the Advanced Search to narrow your search criteria and refine the search results.

Searching with Keywords

GALILEO does not have a searching algorithm, the way popular search engines and social media apps do, and its search function does not understand full sentences or spelling errors. To properly search databases like GALILEO, you need to carefully format your search as a keyword search and then use the filters provided by GALILEO to narrow down your results.

To identify your keywords, look for the important phrases in your research question. For example:

The keywords have been highlighted in bold: COVID-19, mental health, HBCU.

You could search these terms and likely find many helpful resources. However, the more niche your topic becomes, the more you may want to experiment searching using synonyms and related terms.

COVID-19 might become "pandemic," "coronavirus," or even "quarantine."

Mental health could be narrowed down to "anxiety" or "depression," or you could broaden it to "health" if you wanted to examine all health outcomes for HBCU students. You could search related terms, like "psychological impact" or just "psychology."

HBCU could (and should!) be expanded to "historically Black colleges and universities" during your search. If you are working with acronyms or nicknames, it's always smart to conduct searches using the full name or title. You could even search for specific universities, with keywords like "Savannah State University" or "Howard University."

Using Quotation Marks

Because GALILEO does not understand conversational language, you have to tell it when you are using a keyword or phrase that contains two or more words that need to be searched together.

For example, if you are searching for information about the chemist Alice Ball, it is good practice to keep her name in quotation marks ("Alice Ball"). Otherwise, you may get results about the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which the character named Alice plays a game of croquet using a live hedgehog as her ball. That wouldn't be very helpful for your research paper about the woman who discovered the treatment for leprosy!

Filter Your Results

One easy way to search for scholarly articles is to filter your results. Once you have entered your keywords and hit search on the Discover tool's homepage, you can easily use the buttons beneath the search bar limit the results to Peer Reviewed and Full Text, an option that will only show you the results that contain the full text of the article as a PDF or other attachment.

If you need to further narrow your results, you can explore other filters as needed, which will allow you to limit the year of publication, the journal, the subject(s), and more!

Save Your Sources

After spending all that time choosing keywords and filtering your results, you will want to save your sources. You can do this in several ways using the menu beside the title:

1. Save the result by creating an account through GALILEO. When you create an account, you can save results by clicking the ribbon icon. Make sure you log in before saving, or you will lose your saved sources when you end your current session!

2. Start a Microsoft Word or Google Docs document that contains citations and permalinks. Click on the quotation marks to generate a citation for the source. You can select the format (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) and then copy/paste this into your notes.

3. Save to a Project. Much like saving to your account, GALILEO allows you to save sources to specific project folders using the folder icon, allowing you to separate your saved sources into distinct folders if you are working on more than one research project.

4. Share the source via email. Using the arrow icon, you can email yourself (or your professor or members of a group project!) a permalink to the source. You can also download to Google or OneDrive with this option.

5. Download the record. Using the download icon, you can easily download the record and store it on your device to enable you to find the article later.

Accessing GALILEO off-campus is as easy as selecting Savannah State University and logging in with your TigerWorld Single Sign-On information.