Instructions for Finding and Vetting Sources

Google Scholar (for finding journal articles and other sources)

1. Go to http://scholar.google.com.

2. If you have access to a university library: Click on the menu in the upper-left corner, and select the Settings option (which has a gear icon). Click on Library links in the menu at top. Type the name of your university (e.g., Virginia Commonwealth University) in the text field. You should see a checkbox appear for your university. Check the box. Then click on Save at the bottom. 

3. Now you will see library links next to the search results when you conduct searches on Google Scholar. Clicking on those links will take you to the associated websites for those sources and will often allow you to read them in full. Note that you may have to log into your university account first if you haven’t already. Also, at times Google Scholar will say the text for a paper or other source cannot be accessed even though you have set up a library link and the source is indeed available through your university library; in that case, you may need to search for the source directly in your library's online catalog. (More information about setting up library links and using other features of Google Scholar can be found at http://guides.library.vcu.edu/google/scholar.)

4. Now you can search in Google Scholar from the scholar.google.com page. If you’re looking for a specific article or book, you can put the text of it in quotes—e.g., "Show the animal: Constructing and communicating new elite food tastes at upscale butchers shops"—and it will locate sources with that exact phrasing. Once you locate a useful source, click on the link to the right of its title, which should take you to your university library's page for that paper or book (if you library has the corresponding journal subscription or publisher access) or to another site that Google Scholar has identified as containing the text of the source. If there is no link, Google Scholar has not identified a site where the source can be downloaded. You can click on the title of the source for more details about where to find it. 

5. The library link for your university will normally take you to a page in its online catalog with one or more links to the source. Click on one of those links. At this point you will normally be taken to a journal website or a repository of papers where you can read the text and/or download a PDF. Follow the instructions on the website. If the site you visit is charging you money to view the paper, you may not have logged into your university library account properly (or, the paper isn’t available through your university's digital subscriptions, in which case you may want to look for a different source).

6. You can use the same techniques you use in Google’s regular web search in Google Scholar. A hyphen (-) will exclude a particular search term: for instance, sociology –"political science" lists all the papers that include the word “sociology” and do not include the phrase “political science.” OR will find papers with either of the two search terms and not limit itself to articles with both: for instance, apples OR oranges lists those papers with the word “apples” along with those papers with the word “oranges,” not just those with both “apples” and “oranges” (note that OR here needs to be capitalized). 

7. Advanced Search: For more targeted searches, click on the menu in the upper-left corner of the scholar.google.com page. Click on Advanced search in the menu. Enter whatever terms you wish in the fields provided. Note that you can search by title (choose the option under where my words occur for in the title of the article), by author (use the field Return articles published in), and by the date (use the field Return articles dated between). Instead of using the Advanced Search menu, you can just type the relevant search operators into the search bar. For instance, you can use author: and intitle: (such as author:Ocejo or intitle:"Show the animal"), which will search for the text in the article’s author field or its title field, respectively. This is more targeted than just using quote marks; for example, intitle:"Show the animal" will find just articles with that title and will exclude studies that only mention this article title in their reference lists. Use source: and site: to find articles in a particular journal or website, respectively (such as source:"annual review" or site:nber.org). You can use hyphens (-) to exclude items with any of these terms, too.

See the many Google Search and Google Scholar guides online for more information on how to search for scholarly articles and other sources. You can also refer to this list of search operators (which can be used in Google Scholar as well as Google's other search engines). 

Journal Citation Reports (for finding journal articles and other sources)

1. To determine if the journal is well-cited within your field, visit your university library's online catalog, you can look up its impact factor in Journal Citation Reports. Go to your university's online catalog and search for this subscription-only resource. Then click on the link that should appear to the separate Journal Citation Reports website. 

2. Enter the name of the journal in the search bar and then click on the corresponding link that appears below. Two top generalist journals, American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology, scored 7.1 and 4.4, respectively, for their journal impact factors (JIF) as measured in 2023; respectable specialty journals can have impact factors lower than 1.0, but the journal should be mentioned in Journal Citation Reports if it is an influential journal. 

3. You can also see a list of sociology journals sorted by impact factors by clicking on Categories in top menu, then clicking on the Social Sciences, General, and then clicking on Sociology in the subsequent menus. By default, the journals are sorted in descending order by the journal impact factor, which appears in the column titled [YEAR] JIF (where [YEAR] is the publication year used to calculate the impact factor).

Perusall (for collaboratively annotating PDFs and other documents)

1. Go to perusall.com and click on Log In the upper-right-hand corner.

2. You can choose the Sign in with Google option to sign in with your VCU email account and password. (Or select whatever sign-in option you prefer.)

3. Enter your email address and click on OK at the bottom. (You can review the terms of service and their privacy policy on this page.)

4. Click on Create or enroll in a course.

5. Click on I am a student.

6. Enter the Course code that your professor provided to you (for example, CHEN-5GQVH).

7. Click on the Assignments tab at the top of the page and then click on the assignment that you wish to work on.

8. To comment on the document, highlight text by left-clicking and dragging over the words. A comment bubble will appear on the right-hand side of the screen. Enter your comment in that bubble. Click Enter when you are done, and the comment will be saved.

9. To delete a comment, click on the trash can symbol right under the comment.

10. To comment on someone else's comment, click on that comment and write in the bubble that appears under their comment in the right-hand window.

Zotero (for citations management)

1. Go to Zotero.org and download both the desktop application and the Zotero Connector for your particular browser (Chrome and Firefox are supported). Install the desktop application and the browser connector.

2. Run the desktop application and go to Edit > Preferences. Click on the Sync button at top. If you haven't already, click on Create Account and set up an account. Then go back to the same page and log into your account.

3. To add a citation to your library, visit any webpage for that citation (such as its library page, its Amazon page, etc.) and click on the Zotero button that should have appeared to the right of the address bar in your browser after you installed the Zotero Connector. It will automatically save the citation information to whatever folder you choose in the menu that appears. (You can change that folder in the menu, and choose the More... option for the full list of folders.) You can create your own folders in the Zotero by clicking on the folder button in the top-left corner of the desktop application (or, right-click on an existing folder and select New Collection). If the citation information you're finding with your searches isn't very good, you may have to input the citation manually. To do so, go to the Zotero desktop application and click on the green circle with a plus sign at the top of the page. Choose the appropriate citation type (Book, Journal Article, etc.) and then enter the citation information in the right-hand pane.

4. Once you have created the citation, you can insert it into a Google Doc (here is more information on integrating Zotero into word processors, including Word and LibreOffice). If you open Google Docs in the same browser, a Zotero menu should not appear alongside the normal File, Edit, View, etc., menus. Go to the place in the document where you want to insert the in-text citation. Then select Zotero > Add/edit citation. You will need to log into the email account corresponding to your Zotero account and then choose the style of citations (for instance, American Sociological Association (ASA) 6th edition).

5. A Zotero search bar will appear. Search for the citation you just added to Zotero using whatever keywords you wish. Select the correct citation out of the search list that will automatically appear as you type. You can keep adding more citations if you wish to include multiple in-text citations. You can also click on individual citations and check the box Omit Author if the author name has already been mentioned in the text and you just want to include the publication year. When you are done adding citations, click Enter from anywhere within the Zotero search bar and the citation will be inserted into the text.

6. To automatically insert the bibliography at the end of your paper, click on where you want to insert it first. Then select Zotero > Add/edit bibliography. The full bibliographic information for any in-text citations within that Google Document will be pasted into the document.

7. Note that you can edit the bibliographic information for any citations in the Zotero desktop application or website. For those edits to appear in your Google Doc, however, you may need to select Zotero > Refresh from within the document.

8. If you wish to pull citations from a shared Zotero Group, you will need to be logged into the Zotero desktop application using the right email address as described in Step 2. Note that you may need to close the application and reopen it in order to see the shared Group appear in the left-hand pane of the desktop application. To create Zotero groups, you should log into your account in Zotero.org, click on your profile, and then click on Groups in the top menu. Then click on Create a New Group at the top.