Best Resources for this Course
Finding Journal Articles
Often your professor will ask you to use scholarly articles, academic articles, or peer-reviewed articles. These are generally all the same thing. They are written by scholars who are experts in their fields and are usually tied to a college or university. They are great for:
- Credible and trustworthy information
- Recent findings and research topics in the field
- Research studies, tables, and data
- Bibliographies and reference lists.
Tip: Use synonyms for the terms in your searches to vary results. Academic databases use scholarly terms to best identify the subjects they discuss.
Find Articles for your paper in these databases:
- Academic Search Premier (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
Provides searching of over 8,500 journals, including peer-reviewed, across a wide range of topics. coverage: 1975 to present - Biography in Context This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive database of biographical information on more than one million people throughout history and around the world. It combines biographies from 70 Gale Group publications, the complete Marquis Who's Who, Merriam-Webster's collegiate and biographical dictionaries, and full-text articles from over 250 periodicals. The Biography Research Guide will help you get started doing biographical research. - JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A full-text collection of more than 400 journals in business and the liberal arts, with especially strong coverage of business, finance, economics, history, regional studies, education, and sociology. (Our subscription includes the Arts & Sciences I, Arts & Sciences IV, Business I, and Business II collections.) JSTOR is notable for the high quality of the journals it includes. The most recent three to five years of each journal are usually excluded from JSTOR, however.
- Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Provides full text criticisms, biographies, bibliographies, and work overviews. "Find up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world, supplemented by the scholarly materials of the Scribner Writers Series and Twayne's World, U.S., and English Authors Series."
Finding Books and Ebooks
Bowman Library has a large variety of books and ebooks that are chosen for their relevance to the courses offered. You can access ebooks directly from the library website whether your off or on campus. Books and ebooks are good for finding overviews and history of your topic. You don't need to read the whole book to get the information you need for your project; often one chapter of a scholarly book will cover the information you need.
The following subject terms may lead to relevant sources:
Search the Bowman Library catalog:
Searching the catalog doesn't find everything we have! Check out the other tabs in this box to search for more specific types of information in databases and other sites on the web.
Online Resources
Try some of the following databases to find more information for your paper.
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
A great source for definitions, background information, or a topic overview to orient your thinking. Credo provides full-text reference books in 20 subject areas from over 180 titles and 65,000 images, with cross-references that cut across topics, titles, & publishers. - Gale Virtual Reference Library This link opens in a new windowAllows you to search a single eBook or multiple eBooks at once, including multi-volume encyclopedias, biographical collections, and specialized reference sources. Subjects covered go from the Arts & Biography, to Business, Multicultural Studies, Science, and much more.
- GoogleTry using a site search in Google to find reviews or interviews related to your book, film or object. Click on the Searching Online tab on this page for more detailed instructions, strategies, & tips.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowProvides access to scholarly literature "across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations." Note that many articles contain only the citation and no full text; if full text is not available, you can order articles or books via Interlibrary Loan.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a great place to search for articles about your topic. Google Scholar includes scholarly article content, as well as chapters from authoritative books and reports. Google Scholar is a great place to search when you are not having luck in the databases. It is more forgiving, and often can help find relevant articles important to your research. After finding some articles in Scholar, you can discover how the subject matter is discussed, and revisit the databases armed with some good information and powerful search terms.
Keep in mind that full text may not always be available from Google Scholar; if you have enough time, articles that do not have accompanying full text may be requested through Interlibrary Loan.
Another place to search for needed information is simply to 'Google it.' Again, it is important to think about what results you are finding: Who is the author or sponsor, why is the information being published? Is there obvious bias? How authoritative is the source you find?
Google gives you so many results it is difficult to know which ones are useful or reliable. Articles rise to the top of a search based on the number of times they are clicked on; this might not be the best way to choose what will be most important for your search.
But, Google allows several ways for you to target your results. If you implement some of the following techniques, you will find that you can leverage the power of Google to help you find solid results for your project. Try out some of the tips below.
Get the most out of your Google search
Searching in Google can also help you uncover relevant articles for your research. The problem is, how to find results that will be helpful?
SITE Searching
One way to target results in Google is to employ the site search. This requires you use a specific phrase before adding search terms to tell Google you only want results from a specific website or domain. The search always begins with site + colon + URL or Domain all without any spaces; next, add a space and insert your search terms. See the examples below -
- site:nytimes.com humor film OR movies This search phrase tells Google that you'd like results from the New York Times website that mention humor and film or movies. **This is one of the best ways to search for articles on a given topic in the New York Times**
- site:gov humor American fiction This search phrase tells Google you'd like to see articles, commentary, etc., from government websites that includes information about humor in American fiction
- site:edu humor satire culture This search phrase tells Google to retrieve articles published by or in educational institutions that focus on humor, satire and culture as a topic. Note: You could add a title, a genre, or a time period to narrow the results even further.
Other search tips in Google
- Limit the date of your results by inserting the phrase after + colon + year or date without any spaces
- after:2019 Humor and satire college contexts This phrase tells Google that you'd like all your results to have been published after 2019 (note: the after phrase can come before or after your search terms)
- Or, you can limit your results to a given date range by clicking on Tools under the search bar, and then Any Time under that.
- Search for an exact phrase by putting your terms in quotes when entering them in the search bar, e.g., "hate speech" -- using the quotes will ensure you retrieve results with that exact phrase.
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