Finding scholarly articles

Scholarly articles are published in scholarly, or academic, journals. The library has physical copies of some of these journals. Digitized versions are available online, primarily through subscription databases. The first three below are databases they contain many different journals from various academic fields. Google Scholar also compiles scholarly articles, though often you will not be able to access those due to paywall restrictions. Some articles, however, are available through open access publishing and can be found using Google Scholar, it is included here.

Identifying Keywords

Before you open a database and begin your search, it is useful to do some preparation. Think about your topic and which keywords might be associated with it. Then, think of possible synonyms for those keywords.

Keywords are the central concepts or ideas that you are searching for--they could be people (Calico Jack, pirates), places (the south sea, Bermuda), or things (the jolly roger, astrolabes). But, they may also be concepts or ideas (egalitarianism, mercantilism).

Connecting keywords

Most databases use Boolean operators rather than the natural language searching that we are familiar with from Google and other web search engines. The key difference is that databases don't deliver you great results if you use words beyond your keywords and the 3 Boolean operators, and, or, and not.

For example, rather than searching for who were the accused witches in the Salem witch trials? as you might in Google, you would want a search for Salem AND witches AND accused.

The shaded area in the diagrams below demonstrate how these simple operators work.

Search Strategies

Phrase Searching

Utilizing a phrase search assures that your results prioritize or are limited to sources that use the two or more terms you search together as a phrase the way you intend, rather than finding results that have each of the words, but not necessarily together.

To search a phrase, place "quotation marks" around your terms.

Truncation

Truncating your keyword allows you to search multiple variations of a word at once based on a shared stem or root.

To use truncation, insert at asterisk (*) at the end of your root or stem.

Example: buccaneer* will return results for buccaneer, buccaneers, and buccaneering

Example: mutin* will give results for mutinous, mutiny, mutinies, mutineer, mutinying, and mutinied