No one wants to read through thousands of articles just to find out the majority of them are not relevant to your paper topic. To avoid that you have to search strategically, which means:
Search in the right place: You've probably heard librarians tell you before that using the library resources is best. You know from personal experience that you find so much more information much more easily by using Google. That's true. Google is easy and it gives you tons of information. The problem is: will your professor accept that information as scholarly? And which of those 3 million articles is most relevant for your research paper? Google searches are based on business algorithms (i.e. the top results most often are trying to sell you something). Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) is better. It isn't trying to sell you anything directly. It gives you scholarly papers. The problem is, often they are in journals that want you to pay to access the article. That's why librarians recommend the library databases: they provide you with scholarly articles that the university has already paid for you to access.
Search the right way: When you search library databases, it's not like searching Google. You can't just put in keywords once and get a million results. If you search using the word "teaching," for example, and you don't find what you want, you will need to search again using a synonym, such as "education." Or you might need to use specialized academic terminology like "pedagogy." Or you might need to combine terms in a particular way to get the results you want.
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