Library Resources

Library Catalog: The library catalog catalogs (naturally) books, periodicals, government documents, and audiovisual materials that Olson library owns. To find magazine or journal articles, use the resources listed below.

CQ Researcher: In-depth, non-biased reports on political and social issues, with regular coverage of topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy. CQ Researcher is particularly helpful as each article generally includes information on opposing views, giving both sides of the issue.

MLA Style Guide This is a basic guide - for more complete instructions consult the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. If you need help, don't hesitate to come to the reference desk.

Journal Articles

All article databases are grouped around particular subject areas. To find articles on a particular subject, you first must choose the correct database. You can find a list of databases, grouped by subject here.

Here are some article databases that are more "general" in that they collect articles from many different subject areas in one database:

Academic One File: Journal articles from more than 8,000 scholarly and general periodicals across all fields of study. Indexing from 1980 to present; full-text from 1989 to present.

General One File: Journal, magazine, and news articles from over 9,000 general and scholarly periodicals. Indexing 1980 to present; full-text 1983 to present.

JSTOR: Complete, searchable, full text articles from over 1,000 core scholarly journals, spanning from about 1878 to the most recent 1-5 years.

Scholarly vs. Popular Articles: Not all articles are the same. The majority of articles that you need to use for your research and assignments must be scholarly articles (sometimes also called "peer-reviewed"). This guide tells you how to critique an article and decide if it's scholarly or not.

Keyword Searching

Keyword searches can be used in the library catalog and article databases. They are important because they allow you to find materials without knowing the title or author. Keyword searches combine words that describe the integral concept of your subject on which you want to find materials. In general, once you know how to do keyword searches, you won't have to learn how to do different searches for different databases.

Trent University in Canada has a good on-line tutorial for keyword searching if you get confused or want more help.

For example, say you're going to write a paper arguing that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. Some of the keywords for this subject could be:

"drinking age," "legislation," "law" and "lowering" or "lowered"

(Legislation and law are implied by the subject statement since drinking age is determened by state legislation.)

**Note: If you need to present the opposite position in your paper, using the antonyms of your keywords to do searches would be very helpful.

Remember, you have to command the database to do the search in a particular way -- the way that will provide you with relevant search results. This is done by combining keywords using the Boolean Operators and, or, not.

AND: Retrieves all keywords. Example: doing this search "drinking and age and lowering" tells the database that it should look for all three of these terms in the item record.

OR: Retrieves records that have either one of two search terms. Example: "North America or United States" tells the database to retrieve records that have "North America" or "United States."

NOT: Tells the database to ignore records that have a certain term. Example: "Twins not Minnesota" This search would retrieve articles that have the term "twins," as in the biological phenomena, not the baseball team.

Confused? Justin Bloom at the University of Nevada, Reno does a good job of explaining how Boolean operators work at the Mathewson--IGT Knowledge Center.

***If you get zero results you either need to expand your search by using a more general keyword and/or using synonyms for your keywords. If you get too many results, your search should be narrowed by adding keywords to make the search more specific. For example, if your initial search was just on "drinking age" you could add other keywords that would more closely describe your topic, as in the search examples above.***

Getting Help

If you're having problems finding materials for your assignment and want to ask a librarian for help, just come up to the reference desk. Or, you can get help via chat here

You can also email me at: rajorgen@nmu.edu