Scholarly journal articles are one of the primary means of communicating research ideas. They are an important component of academic research and give you some insight into ongoing debates and scholarly conversations about your topic. You can find articles through database searches.
Finding articles is a two-step process:
- First, search for the topic you are interested in by using the article databases listed on the left.
- Try words to describe the group of individuals you are researching: Asian Americans, Latino Americans, LGBTQ, Christians, Teenage mothers, Upper class, etc.
- Try words to describe your research area: stereotypes, oppression, historical landscape.
- Consider searching for these concepts together. For example, “Asian Americans” and “ stereotypes” = some great articles and books.
- Use the thesaurus to find additional or similar terms.
- Find an article that looks interesting? Look at the article’s citation for subject terms used in that database and run additional searches using these subjects.
- Next, find the actual text of the articles you want by clicking on the PDF, HTML, or Discover button in a database.
- If the Discover link leads you to the library catalog and indicates that we have online full text, click the link to get to the article. In some cases, we may have the full text article available in multiple sources so be sure to check the dates to be sure they match the publication date of the article. If the library catalog page says there is no online full-text available, request full-text access through Interlibrary Loan.
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