Forrer Learning Commons Library Services: HIST 120 The Pacific World Class Guide: Finding Scholarly Articles in Library Databases

Introduction

For your Information Literacy Assigment, you'll need to find and examine one high-quality peer-reviewed journal article. Try searching in the library's Discovery service and limit your results to just peer-reviewed scholarly articles by selecting "Peer Reviewed" from the Content Type option on the left-side of the results screen:

Also try searching in the databases below, or try using the advanced search techniques described.

Relevant Library Databases

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is the online archives of scholarly journals in most fields. Full text begins with the first issue of many journals and ends with issues 5-7 years old.
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
This database covers all aspects of the humanities, with content pertaining to literary, scholarly and creative thought. Contains full text of over 1,200 journals and indexing to many more.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Offers access to over 600 quality journal titles from 40 scholarly publishers, covering fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Bridgewater subscribes to the full text of the Premium Journal Collection.

Boolean Searching (AND, OR, and NOT)

These three operators allow you to combine search terms and search more efficiently:

AND will produce results that contain BOTH terms (e.g. "Great War" AND China)
OR generates results that contain EITHER term (e.g."Great War" OR "World War One")
NOT results will include the first terms, but not the second ("World War One" NOT "World War Two")

Phrase Searching (" ")

In databases, you can use quotation marks to isolate a phrase. For instance, if you're looking for resources on World War One, you will want to use quotation marks around that phrase to ensure that you get this exact sequence of words. For example:

searching World War One (without quotation marks) yields 75,000 results in the library catalog, while
searching "World War One" (with quotation marks) yields 1,200 results in the library catalog.