Scholarly journals differ from popular magazines in a number of important ways. Popular magazines are produced for a wide audience and provide basic information and/or entertainment. Scholarly journals are written for scholars, students, and researchers and exist to advance the cause of research in a given field.
Here are some clues that will help you identify scholarly journals. Scholarly journals:
This full-text database of peer-reviewed academic journals covers nearly all areas of study including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, arts, and literature. Content from these databases is also available: Computer Source, Health Source, Professional Development Collection, Psychology and Behavioral Science, Religion and Philosophy and the Sociology Collection. DEDICATED GUIDE | HELP SHEET |VIDEO TUTORIAL
Pick out the most important words or phrases about your topic. What words do experts use about your topic? Is there more than one word or phrase for the same concept?Searching Google or Wikipedia for your topic can be a good way to come up with keywords.
Need help with keywords? Contact a librarian, or try this UT Libraries tool to help you brainstorm keywords.
No one combination of keywords will bring you back everything on a topic. You may have to do several searches in the database using different combinations of keywords to make sure you're not missing some resources.
For this topic, our most important keywords are technology and society. But those words are too general - we want specific words!
In this example, you could brainstorm specific types of technologies (Internet, social media, cell phones, texting, etc.), specific ways they negatively affect society (distraction, low grades, car accidents, cyberbullying, etc.), and specific segments of society they may affect (students, teenagers, children, etc.).
The databases contain full-text articles and citations. Full-text articles come in either HTML or PDF (scroll down for the difference) and include every word of the article.
But a citation is only a little bit of information about the article - the title, author(s), where it was published, and an abstract. A citation does not give you much information, and it is not acceptable to use just the abstract as a reference source.
If you see an article like the example below, you are looking at a citation, not a full-text article:
If your article is available in full text, you'll see either an HTML Full Text or PDF Full Text link at the top left, under Detailed Record, like this one:
If you want to make sure you can read the entire article for all of your search results, limit your search to full-text articles. You can do that before or after you search.
If you want to limit before you search, check the Full Text checkbox underneath the Limit Your Results section:
Or if you forget to check the box before you search, you can limit your results to full text from your list of search results. The checkbox appears at the top left of your results:
Check the box and click on Update:
Remember, if you find an article in the database that does not have the full text included, but you think you'd like to read that article, contact a librarian. We can order it for you - for free - through interlibrary loan.
Full text comes in two different formats: HTML and PDF. Sometimes you'll find an article with both full text formats:
If you click on the title of the article, you'll also see the type of full text at the top left, under the Detailed Record icon:
Click on either the HTML or PDF link to open the full text.
In a PDF, the article appears exactly how it looked in the print publication - as though someone scanned a copy of the article. The text formatting, images, and page numbers will be the same as they appear in the print layout:
However, in the HTML view of the same article, only the text of the article is the same. It is like it's copied and pasted on screen, without the formatting and page numbers of the original that the PDF format retains.
It doesn't really matter which format you read: the text of the article is exactly the same, regardless of the format.
One place where format will make a difference, however, is if you are using MLA format to document your sources.
In MLA parenthetical documentation, the author's name and the page number on which you found your quotation or paraphrase must be noted after your quotation. Here's an example:
The author believes the first sentence of Updike's work is "an ideal evocation of the mundane" (Schwarz 181).
If you have an article in PDF Full Text, you should use the original page numbers of the print publication in your parenthetical documentation (in this example, page 181). If you have an article in HTML Full Text, however, you will not have any page numbers - just a block of text - so you would omit page numbers from your parenthetical documentation:
The author believes the first sentence of Updike's work is "an ideal evocation of the mundane" (Schwarz).
So you've done a search with keywords and the database has given you a list of search results. What do you do now?
The first thing to pay attention to is how many results your search returned. You can find it at the top of the results list. Anything more than 100 results might be a signal that you need to refine your search some more.
You can narrow down search results by adding keywords, setting limiters like Scholarly Journals or Publication Date, or using some of the search filters on the left hand side of the page.
This link opens in a new windowThis resource provides access to full-text articles covering a wide array of topics including literature, history, economics, life science and the arts. HELP SHEET | VIDEO TUTORIAL **PLEASE NOTE: The entire JSTOR collection is currently being provided to us free of charge. After 6/30/2023 San Jac libraries will only have the following sections: Arts & Science I-IV, VII and Life Sciences.
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