UCS 20201 Course Guide

Use a database (an online index of articles) to help you locate articles for your research paper. 

Databases can index all sorts of thinks (Netflix and Spotify are both databases!), but for our purposes today, we'll use them to find journal articles. 

Library staff provide an overview to help you get started using online resources for your research:

Why should you begin your research with the library's homepage? How do I know which database to use? Library staff provide an overview to help you get started using online resources for your research.

You can't read 100,000 or even 1,000 articles. Refine your searches to limit your results to just the articles you need!

The words "AND," "OR," and "NOT" can help you make a search more precise. This is called Boolean searching, and it can seem really intimidating, but once you get the hang of them, Boolean searches can really help you!

For example, the search 'films AND psychology NOT children', will return a search with results that contain the keywords 'films' and 'pyschology' but not 'children' - important if you are only looking at adolescent psychology in films.

Learn more with this guide from the MIT libraries. It really helps explain Boolean searching, and you don’t have to be a computer scientist to understand!

The following video also outlines the ways to use advanced search techniques in databases.

Once you've found one good article, check that article's sources. Learn how to make use of those sources to add to your research:

If you already have a citation from a bibliography or other source, you have everything you need to find the article if the library owns it!

First identify the title of the journal or the title of the article.

Example:
Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(3), 5–13.
In the example above:

• The New Criterion is the title of the journal.
• The eclipse of listening is the article title.
• Scruton, R. is the author's name.
• You know that the title is a journal article because the volume is typically listed in a journal citation and a book citation usually has a publisher name. 

Then find the article:

• Use the Hiram College "Finding Journals" search to find journals by title. Then use the year, volume, and page number to narrow down your search.
• Use OneSource to search for articles by article title. 
• Verify that the information is correct, and view the article if it is available, or request it via Interlibrary Loan if it is not. 
• Remember to save the link to the article by using a "Permalink."

Need a little more practice identifying the parts of a citation? The Virginia Tech University Libraries Citation Tutorial can help!

Watch this video to review the ways to locate a journal article when you have a citation!