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 below.
  • Try words to describe the group of individuals you are researching: Asian Americans, Latino Americans, Gays and Lesbians, 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 subjects use in that database and run additional searches using these subjects.

• Next, find the actual text of the articles you want by clicking on the Discover button in a database.
  • If the Discover page 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 databases. If the Discover page says there is no online full-text available, click the link next to "Library Catalog- Holdings in VUFIND" to search the library catalog for print holdings. This will show you if the library owns a copy of the journal/newspaper/book in PRINT form, and tells you the location of that print volume. NOTE: The library catalog will show you the results by JOURNAL title (not article title). You will need to find the year and/or volume and issue number of the journal that contains your article.