Step 5: Collection - Once you have narrowed your research focus, it is time to start collecting research that supports your thesis. The most current research can be found in academic journal articles. You can search for journal articles in library databases. All subject and class LibGuides have a tab listing the best databases to search in a given academic discipline. These tabs are usually labelled "Finding Articles" or "Databases".
The Finding Articles Tab on the History LibGuide provides you with an annotated list of, and links to, databases we use most frequently for history. Many of these, such as JSTOR, Project Muse, and Academic Search Complete, in particular, are excellent resources for finding scholarly journal articles about history.
You should employ the same strategies searching databases as you do when searching catalogs:
In the example below, I am looking for articles that deal with the Spanish Flu in the United States using the database Academic Search Complete.
Please note the following:
Figure 1: Shows my search terms. I type a separate term in each search box and can add as many as I wish by clicking on the plus sign at the lower right of the search boxes.
Figure 2: Shows an icon indicating what the item is. The first item is a periodical article, the second is an academic journal article. Academic journal articles are also frequently referred to as scholarly or peer-reviewed articles.
Figure 3: Indicates whether the item is available full text. If so, you will see a link to a PDF or HTML document. In some cases you might see a link to "linked full text" which will provide you will the full text of the article in another library database.
Figure 4: Indicates the column that allows you to refine your search in a variety of ways such as source type, date published and by subject. This column is similar to the "facets" column in HillSearch.
Keyword vs. Full Text Searching
When you are doing a more involved search, with multiple search terms, you might sometimes be frustrated by finding few, if any results. In the image below, you can see that I found only one result when I searched for the terms "Spanish flu", "united states", "covid-19" and "contract tracing"
However, If I change what I am searching, I can improve my chances of getting relevant results. You'll see that next to boxes for the search terms is series of second boxes with a drop down arrow. In the image above that box reads "select a field". That is the default search setting and will search for your terms in specific fields of the record - such as subject terms, words in the title, etc. It WILL NOT search the entire text of an article. If you retrieve few results, you might want to consider doing an all text search. To do so, just click on the drop down arrow and select "TX All Text" as shown in the search below. In the image below, you will see that when I changed to an all-text search I retrieved 12 results as opposed to one with a keyword search.
An Article's Bibliographic Record
When you look at an individual article's record (click on the article's title from the list of search results), there are several things you should look at as noted in the image below.
Figure 1. Shows the bibliographic information - the title of the article, author, journal in which it appeared, volume number, issue number, date and pages. This is the information you will need to write your citation.
Figure 2. Shows the subject terms associated with this record. Just as in the case with the results in HillSearch, subject terms can help you refine your search by using the same terminology as the database.
Figure 3. Shows the abstract. The abstract provides you with a three to four sentence synopsis of the article. When reviewing a large results set, abstracts are a time saver, allowing you to quickly disregard items that aren't helpful or relevant.
Figure 4: Shows the citation formatting tool. While this can help you as you prepare your citations, you should always check for proper formatting using the MLA Style manual or library citation resources.
Figure 5: Shows the permalink of the citation. If you are emailing citations to yourself or adding them to a word document, use this link as opposed to the URL in the browser's address bar.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |