Academic journals and popular magazines - do you know the difference?
- Check in Ulrichsweb to be sure!
- Go to the publisher's web page to see criteria for submissions
Why use journals?
- They are more up-to-date than most books.
- They are “peer reviewed” by other scholars in the field who check for academic integrity.
- They are concise and focused on a specific aspect of a topic.
- Every article will contain cited references that appear as footnotes and/or bibliographies.
- Most are now in online and accessible anytime and from off campus.
For best results do a search using keywords or phrases in a subject database to find references to scholarly articles.
When a database gives you an option, always limit to scholarly (or academic or peer reviewed) journals.
Tips:
Never limit to full-text only because you will miss any references to articles in journals when another vendor has the full-text publishing rights.
When searching databases, use operators to join concepts together using AND and OR.
Use AND to narrow a search
Example: woman AND girl - both words must be included
Use OR when the concepts are similar, and it does not matter which word is used.
Example: woman OR girl - retrieves records with either term resulting in many more hits than the example above
Use truncation when you want to allow for several spellings or variations on a word.
Example: fem* will find all the words - female, feminine, feminist, feminism, etc.
Recommended Databases
Gale Literature
MLA International Bibliography
JSTOR
Project MUSE
Periodical Archives Online
Tips:
1. Look at all writings by a relevant author and co-authors.
2. Explore the bibliography of a relevant article for more articles.
3. Discover if the articles have been cited since publication.
Use Citation Indexes to find if a particular author and/or paper has been cited by other authors.
