Catholic Social Teaching: Finding Articles

Periodicals are useful for three primary reasons:  they...

- provide a wealth of valuable information that is current and timely
- contain the latest discussions on a topic
- cover topics not yet published in book form

Periodicals are created for different audiences. Some are for general readers and others for scholars and researchers.

Although the terms periodical, journal, serial and magazine have slightly different definitions, you will likely hear them used interchangeably. These are works that come out on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, annually) and contain articles written by various authors.

Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal.There are anonymous and open reviews.

1)    Determine the Key concepts of your topic

2)    Define your key words / search terms.

3)    Choose your databases and resources

4)    Formulate the search statement

5)    Refine and focus your results

6)    Evaluate and manage the results

7)    Locate the full articles

Keyword Searching:

• Skip the words "a" "an" "of" and "the"
• Single keyword, e.g. Transfiguration
• Phrase search - when two or more terms are always used together, put them in quotes e.g. "New Testament"
• Very broad term = a single term, e.g. Scriptures
• Broader yet = add the term "OR" between synonyms, e.g., Scriptures OR Bible 
• More refined = add the term "AND" between terms to focus your topic, e.g. Gospel AND Luke AND Emmaus
• More refined = use "NOT", e.g., Mary NOT Magdalene
• Note: Capitalize the words AND, OR, NOT is your searches

With very few exceptions, UST Libraries resources are available from off-campus.  You will be asked to enter your UST username/password.  This is the username you use for your UST email, not your Banner ID. 

Click the GET IT button in any database to get the full text of an article.  If UST Libraries doesn't own it, you'll be given an option to request it from another library. 

More information

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature (journals) across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. It includes most peer-reviewed online journals. Use FIND IT@UST Libraries to get the full-text if not available in Google Scholar.