CTW 1 - Benyoussef

Journal Articles are also called Scholarly Articles or Academic Sources.  One kind of Scholarly Article is called a Peer Reviewed Article.

If your instructor asks you to find journal articles or peer reviewed articles, you will want to use specialized databases to help you find articles on your topic.

Check out the list of databases below for our recommendations of where to start on your topic.

For more information on what scholarly sources are, check out the video below.

Once you've chosen a specific database (see the box List of Databases for this Topic for suggestions), you can use the tools in the database to get to articles on your research question.  The suggestions below only work in the individual databases, not in the search bar for the library catalog.

1. Don't search on your whole research question:

The library databases don't deal well with a whole English sentence.  And they don't recognize synonyms.  So you will want to break your research question down into concepts and search on the concepts.  Here's an example:

Research Question:  How did ancient Greek democracy influence the writers of the US constitution?

Concepts:  ancient greece   - democracy - US constitution

Each one of these concepts would go into its own search box so that you can adjust each one as you see the results.

2. Use shortcuts to help the database search more efficiently

Here's a screenshot of the same search concepts from the example above:

The quote marks around "ancient greece" tells the database to search that exact phrase, not two separate words.   The asterisk on the second search box "democra*" tells the database to choose any results that use words that are variations of democra- which means you would get results with both the words "democracy" and "democratic" .   Databases have a number of shortcut tools that can help you narrow or expand your searches exactly how you want them.  Check out the other boxes on this page to see different shortcuts.

3.  Use the autocomplete!

Different authors will use different terms to refer to the same ideas.  Some author might write an article about "traffic patterns" while another might cover the same concept using the term "traffic systems".  Library databases don't understand that the two terms refer to the same things.  But you don't have to know all of the possible variations!  By using the autocomplete the database will tell you what search terms are attached to articles you are looking for.    Using the same search as above, I decided to check out the autocomplete to see what options there are for searching for "Constitution".  Here's the result:

The autocomplete suggests both "constitution" and "constitution of the united states", but I don't see "US constitution".  So this helps me find the right keywords quickly.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined with logic operators. The following operators are allowed: AND, +, OR, NOT and -.

Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS

AND

The AND operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the AND operator is used. The AND operator matches records where both terms exist anywhere in the field of a record.

To search for records that contain "economics" and "Keynes" use the query:

economics Keynes

or

economics AND Keynes

+

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in the field of a record.

To search for records that must contain "economics" and may contain "Keynes" use the query:

+economics Keynes

OR

The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching record if either of the terms exist in a record.

To search for documents that contain either "economics Keynes" or just "Keynes" use the query:

"economics Keynes" OR Keynes