Course Guides: Hist480: Senior Thesis: Articles

Article Databases

America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
The primary library database for North American history.
Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
The primary library database for world history.

Google Scholar
Google's answer to scholarly searching. Wide-ranging, including links to articles, books, theses, student papers, and whatever else it deems scholarly.

Arts & Sciences (JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
An archive of scholarly journals, often dating to the first issue of the journal (to the 1800s in some cases). Newest issues of journals (last 3 to 5 years) are usually not included.

Academic Search Complete (EBSCO)
EBSCO's largest and general-interest database. Most communication-related material here will also be in the Communication & Mass Media database.

Thinking about a topic related to:

Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Scholarly business and economics journals and newspaper/magazine articles dealing with business and commerce. Also provides detailed statistics and company profiles.
Women's Studies International This link opens in a new window
Covers the core disciplines in Women’s Studies to the latest scholarship in feminist research. Coverage includes more than 871,000 records and spans from 1972 and earlier to the present. Over 2,000 periodical sources are represented. Focused on scholarly journals, with the inclusion of some activist publications.

Environment Complete This link opens in a new window
Find full text and citations from more than 1300 journals in the area of environmental history, conservation, marine science, energy, geography, environmental law, and more.

1. Use subject headings!

2. Take advantage of any “times cited” or “cited by” features (available most prominently in Google Scholar, EBSCO and JSTOR).

3. If I search for DOCTORS PATIENTS COMMUNICATION, what does the database search for?

Most will search for both the plural and singular forms of the word. (The library catalog and WorldCat will NOT do this).
Most will search for your terms as a phrase, though some will assume you meant to put an AND between the words. (For example, all EBSCO databases will search for a phrase; the library catalog will put an AND between each word.)

4. To search for a phrase, put quotation marks around the phrase: “doctor-patient communication.” (this applies in every database I’m aware of).

5. To search for synonyms, combine them with an OR.

6. To expand your search, use wildcards or truncation figures.

An asterisk frequently is used to represent multiple characters: comput* will retrieve computers, computing, etc.
A question mark is frequently used to represent a single character. Wom?n will retrieve women and woman (though many databases will automatically search for both now).

7. When searching full text (in a database such as JSTOR or LexisNexis), use proximity search operators (sometimes called search connectors).

JSTOR: "doctor patient"~10 : Requires that the words be within 10 words of each other)
Lexis-Nexis: doctor w/10 patient : Requires that the words be within 10 words of each other.

Doctor w/s patient : Requires that the words be in the same sentence.

Doctor w/p patient : Requires that the words be in the same paragraph.

8. Examples of other interesting search functionality (usually available by looking at the Help pages):

In LexisNexis: “length>500” : the article must be greater than 500 words.
In JSTOR: Doctors patients communication^7 : The word communication is 7 times more important than the words doctors and patients. Rank these results by relevance accordingly.