The journal indexes listed below will help you to find relevant scholarly articles, and the tips and video will help you get started.

 The following journal indexes will help you find peer-reviewed, scholarly articles for your assignment.

General

• GEOBASE
  • Strong for finding articles in the field of geography.
  • Note the Turn Off AutoSuggest / Turn On AutoSuggest toggle in Quick Search - How you want to set this will depend upon how many results you are getting and how relevant your search results are.
  • You may limit the language of your search results to English.
• Academic Search Complete
• Social Sciences Full Text
• Complete list of journal indexes.

Special tips:

If you are finding one or two excellent articles and you want to find more similar articles, the following tools will help:

• Web of Science: Search for the title of a relevant article within quotation marks, click on the title of the article in the result list, and click on View Related Records.  The articles with the most shared references (and thus most likely to be similar to the original article) will appear first.
• Google Scholar: Search for the title of a relevant article within quotation marks, find the article in the result list, and click on Related articles.  Again, the most relevant articles should appear first.

The three-minute video below, produced by Kealin McCabe, provides basic instructions for using a journal index.

Kealin is using the multidisciplinary journal index Academic Search Complete in the video, but remember that most journal indexes operate in essentially the same way.

Special Tips:

• Subject terms are there for a reason.  Use suggested subject terms, or subject terms that you find in database full entries, to revise your searches.
• Use the following to connect your terms:
  • AND -- Narrows your search.  Each item in your search results will contain ALL your search terms.  E.g., homelessness AND elderly.
  • OR - Broadens your search.  Each item in your search results will contain either one or both of your search terms.  E.g., elderly OR aged.
  • These may be combined.  E.g., homelessness AND (elderly OR aged).
• Truncate your search terms, usualy with *, where appropriate.  E.g., teen* will retrieve teen, teens, teenager, etc.
• Can't get to the full-text article from the journal index?  It can happen, but don't give up!  Start at minute 2:10 in the video below to learn how to find an article that is not available in full text in the journal index.  Remember that older articles may be available in the Library collection in another format (print, microform).
• If you find that an article isn't in the library collection, you may still place an interlibrary loan. This means that the Library will get the article for you from another library.