Tutorial: Searching for Journal Articles

This is in many ways the toughest part of the course. It’s an introduction to the many, many databases that we have available at Feinberg. What’s difficult is that they all work similarly to each other, but aren’t exactly alike.

There are at least two different ways to get to our periodicals:

1. The Research Tools page

Research Tools page

The Research Tools page, which you’ve already seen when searching for subject encyclopedias, is the quickest way to get to journal articles that are relevant to your research.

The page allows you to filter databases by subject and by resource type. Choose “Articles” for scholarly journals. The page lists “key resources” with broad coverage on the right-hand side. If you filter by subject, it will show a list of “Best Bet” resources at the top and a list of related research guides to the right.

Below is an example for someone searching for history articles.

Research Tools page, filtered for History

Once you’ve found an appropriate database, the “Videos and Tutorials” section lower down here will show you how to search it.

From the Research Tools page, looking under Key Resources, you can also use the item “Journal Search (Journals A-Z)” to search for the title of a given periodical, if you already know what you’re looking for.

Find It at Feinberg tab

On the library home page, under the “Find Articles” tab:

You can use the “Find It at Feinberg!” search box to search across a collection of all our periodicals. By clicking the “peer-reviewed” checkbox as shown here, you’ll limit yourself to just materials from journals that publish scholarly, peer-reviewed articles. Note that this search will also retrieve non-peer-reviewed items from those journals, like book reviews or letters to the editor.

The “Google Scholar” tab allows you to search Google’s specialized search engine devoted to academic work. It covers all the databases we have and more. If you’re searching from school, you’ll find that you can get directly to articles in our subscription databases via links to the right of each result in a Google Scholar search.

Sounds great, so why not use Google Scholar for everything? Well, it turns out it throws up a lot of crud mixed with the worthwhile results. But if you already know the author and title of a specific article you’re looking for, there’s nothing better.

The best thing you can do is try as many of these links as you have the time for.

Videos and Tutorials

There are a number of tutorials that can help with individual databases. Here are some to start with.

“Find It at Feinberg!” (a/k/a Primo)

Academic Search Complete

Also any other database made by EBSCO — you’ll see the blue-and-green design elsewhere.

ProQuest Research Library

Many other ProQuest databases, like the ABI/Inform business database, have the same interface.

JSTOR

Google Scholar


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