What is a scholarly article?
Useful Databases to Find Scholarly Articles
- America: History and Life with Full Text This link opens in a new windowThis database covers the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. With selective indexing for 1,700 journals from 1964 to the present, this database also provides full-text coverage of more than 196 journals and more than 92 books.
- Political Science Complete This link opens in a new windowPolitical Science Complete contains full-text for more than 520 journals and indexing & abstracts for over 2,900 titles, including top-ranked scholarly journals. The database has a worldwide focus, reflecting the globalization of contemporary political discourse.
- Social Science Premium Collection This link opens in a new windowContains more than 1,800 full-text articles and over 14,000 abstracts from scholarly journals and dissertations in the social sciences such as criminal justice, education, language behavior, linguistics, political science, sociology, etc.
Search Strategies for Finding Journal Articles
Searching databases for journal articles is a bit more challenging than using tools such as Google. The good news is that you have a lot more control over how you design the search. This also means you should get better, more targeted results.
- Before you start your research, try focusing your topic by writing a one sentence research question. For example: Under what circumstances can a president authorize the use of force without congressional approval?
- Identify the main ideas in your research question.
- presidents
- use of force
- congressional approval
- Boil the statement down to keywords, or the most important elements of your issue. EX: presidents, war, emergency, crisis, congress, legislature
- Use an asterisk to find variations of a word. EX: presiden* will find presidency, president, presidents, presidential
- Then, separate the keywords with the "and" and "or" connectors EX: (war or emergency or crisis) and (congress* or legislat*)
The above search strategy in the America: History and Life database will look like this.
When you look at your list of results in the database, If the full-text of an article is not readily available i, click on the FIND IT AT SCU icon to see if it's available in another database or in print in the library.