Washington and Lee University Research Guides: SOAN 395: SENIOR SEMINAR IN SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS (Professor Jasiewicz): Find Articles

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Subjects: Community Based Learning, Education, Journalism and Mass Communications, Law, Justice, and Society, Poverty and Human Capability, Sociology and Anthropology

Does W&L Have This Article?

You can use an option on the library homepage entitled Journal Search to enter the title of the journal or magazine you are looking for.

An example: European Journal of Social (incomplete title)

Be sure to take note of the limited years of coverage (if any) for each option.

Article Databases -- Specialized Scholarly

Focus on scholarly/academic journals and related materials. Note that most databases enable you to limit search results to scholarly/peer-reviewed journals.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Excellent starting point. Multidisciplinary article database offers access to more than 16,000 journals, magazines, and newspapers, including over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive coverage of sociology and its sub-disciplines, with very good coverage of related areas of study, especially politics. In addition to full-text journals, it contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
The world's most comprehensive source for bibliographic coverage of psychology and behavioral sciences literature. Subjects covered include education, linguistics, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, physiology, psychiatry, sociology, and other areas.
Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window
Coverage of "emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry and psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational and experimental methods." Full-text coverage of 570 journals and magazines, of which 551 are peer-reviewed.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Described as the largest citation-and-abstract database in the world, Scopus features broad coverage of scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences literature, as covered in about 14,000 peer-reviewed resources, as well as academic Web sites from the Scirus database. Scopus also functions as a citation-indexing tool.
Entries dating from 1996 include complete reference (bibliography) listings, while earlier entries (back to 1966) include only citations and abstracts.
Combining Terms You can search for entries containing two or more terms by combining them with "AND" in the search statement. Example: college AND stress
Phrases Search for a multi-word phrase by placing the terms within double quotation-marks. Example: "binge drinking"
Wildcards/Truncation The search system will automatically search for singular and plural forms of a term that is entered. Example: cell will find cell and cells.
A question-mark (?) will replace a single character in a search term. Example: analys?s will find analysis and analyses.
An asterisk (*) can replace any number of characters in a search term. Example: behav* will find behavior, behaviour, behavioral, behaviors, behaviorism, etc.
Citation Indexing Note that most entries include a "Cited By" option, which allows you to see publications which have cited the item you are viewing.
Full Text Many entries in the database include "View at Publisher" links, intended to lead you to the complete text of articles, etc. on publisher Web site. In many cases, we actually will not have access to these materials.
Education Research Complete This link opens in a new window
Scholarly research and information relating to all areas of education, including "all levels of education from early childhood to higher education, and all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education, and testing." Full-text content from more than 950 journals, plus indexing of over 1,800 additional journals, some back to the 1980's. Other materials includes full-text conference papers, books, and monographs.
EconLit This link opens in a new window
EconLit, published by the American Economic Association, provides bibliographic coverage of a wide range of economics-related literature. It is an expanded version of the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) covering both economic theory and application, and indexes journal articles, working papers, books, articles (chapters) in collective works, and dissertations.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A digital archive of over 1,100 important scholarly journals. All issues of each journal are included in full-text except for the most recent 2-to-5 years, based on JSTOR's agreement with the journal's publisher.

Think Tanks, Public Policy Groups, and Advocacy Groups
Think tanks and public policy, advocacy, and research groups provide a great deal of information in a wide range of subject areas. See the "Think Tank Search" option.

Trying to Get Ahead of Academic Publishing

Collections of working papers, including very recent material are available from some scholarly associations and academic institutions. Examples:

Article Databases -- News Sources

Here are databases which specialize in searching and providing texts of newpaper articles published from the 1990's to date. (In some databases, earlier articles are also included.)

NewsBank Access World News This link opens in a new window
Articles from 9,000+ U.S. and international full-text information sources, mostly newspapers and wire services. Able to focus a search on news sources from one region of the world or even from one U.S. state at a time.
Westlaw Campus Research This link opens in a new window
Highly respected database covers 7,000 sources for legal information, news sources, and business research. Extensive legal coverage includes law reviews, court cases, statutes, regulations, and more. News sources feature hundreds of U.S. and international newspapers and broadcast transcripts. Business research includes Company Investigator.
Factiva This link opens in a new window
International business and news coverage from over 14,000 sources, including newspapers, news wires, magazines, trade journals, radio and television transcripts, etc. Contemporary coverage of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
Factiva searches for the exact phrase you enter. For example, 'speech recognition software' will find articles that contain those three terms adjacent to each other and in that order.

Combining Terms: Use AND, OR, NOT. For example, 'mci communications AND speech recognition software' will find articles containing both 'mci communications' and 'speech recognition software.'

Truncation: Add an asterisk (*) to the end of a word to search for all forms of that term. Example: congress*.

NOTE: When finished with Factiva, please click on the 'logout' selection in the top right corner of the screen to keep all available accounts open for other users.
Newspaper Source Plus This link opens in a new window
Full-text, cover-to-cover coverage of over 1,200 U.S. and international newspapers, plus selective full-text coverage for an additional 335 U.S. newspapers and transcripts from broadcast news sources. In most cases, chronological coverage extends back only several years, although some coverage begins in the 1990's.

Finding Articles -- Another Possibility

A prominent new option on the library's homepage is a database called Primo, which contains a lot of links to articles and other materials, but it does NOT provide you with access to everything to which the library subscribes. It's fine as a starting point, but probably will not adequately cover most research topics.

For more thorough and/or focused coverage, consult the other library "article databases" listed below.

A sample search of "Articles Only": opioid* AND (employ* OR unemploy*)

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