Research and Course Guides: +Research Methods in Sociology: Finding Articles

Finding Articles

Social Work Databases
Translating into Database Language

SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
SocINDEX with Full Text identifies resources in the field of sociology and related subject areas. It indexes over 3000 journals and provides full text for 890 journals, several dating back to 1908. It also includes full text for over 850 books and monographs, as well as over 16,800 conference reports. It also includes a thesaurus of sociological terms.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
Start here when you need to find research in psychology. Which areas of psychology? Just about all of them. PsycINFO covers mental health, counseling, cognitive science, neuroscience, education, learning, family studies and language. Provides full-text access (back to the first issue) of the journals published by the American Psychological Association, as well as other association journals and many books and book chapters.
PTSDpubs This link opens in a new window
PILOTS is a bibliographic database produced at the headquarters of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in White River Junction, Vermont, and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Its goal is to include citations to all literature on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health sequelae of traumatic events, without disciplinary, linguistic, or geographical limitations, while offering both current and retrospective coverage.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
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Scopus calls itself the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: over 21,500 scientific journals, 130,000 books and conference proceedings, covering all fields of academic study: science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Scopus also includes 8 different citation metrics, analyzing impact at the author, article, journal, and institution levels.
Scopus vendor guide is here: https://elsevier.libguides.com/Scopus/home.
ERIC This link opens in a new window
ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) provides full-text research on a wide range of education topics. Includes peer-reviewed journals, books, research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, and much more.
Education Source This link opens in a new window
Covers a wide range of education topics from early childhood to higher ed as well as educational specialties like adult education, multilingual education, and more. Includes peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, books, and more.
Expanded content and coverage replacing Education Full Text.
Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Criminal Justice Abstracts provides comprehensive coverage of international journals, books, reports, dissertations and unpublished papers on criminology and related disciplines. This version provides full-text for approximately 200 criminal justice journals.
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive collection of newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic, minority, and native press. All articles are full-text. Updated quarterly. 1990- .

Subject: Database's vocabulary (different for each database)

Keyword: Your vocabulary

LImiters: Special to each database ("Age Group" below)

Databases use a grammar of AND, OR, AND NOT. No prepositions, verbs, determiners, affixes -- anything you learned in English or human language classes

Finding Search Terms

Use your book and overview article to find terms and topics:

I found an article on MIgrant Health. (See the link below). I thought of a question I might want to find information about:

There seems to be protective factors for newly arrived immigrants that are lost in subsequent generations. Why might this be true?

Click on the link below and see how I found words that I can use in my search. Here are the first 2 pages with new search terms circled:

Then I organized the words into groups by similarity or synonyms. (Migrant or immigrant).

Migrant Health
Click on the link and see how I found words that I can use in my search. Here are the first 2 pages with new search terms circled
New search terms are circled

population	illness	sociological situation
migrants	"respiratory disease"	agricultural
hispanic OR latino	"lung disease"	"industrialized nation"
farmworkers	allergies OR allergens	"disease awareness"
immigrants

To search in SocIndex and Academic Search Premier (links below), choose one word from each box and put AND between them. You'll get articles that are about all three. Play with mixing the terms up with each other until you get a good search: (Notice if words are redundant: farmworkers and agriculture -- you probably don't need both).

farmworkers AND "respiratory illness"

immigrants AND allergies

Do the same thing with your overview article. Then search in SocINDEX and Academic Search Premier.