Use the following databases to find scholarly and peer-reviewed articles on your topic.
Index to journal articles and bibliographic citations to books and dissertations on the history of the world (except for) the U.S. and Canada from 1450 to the present.
Access ebooks and scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, sciences, and the social sciences. Journal content is often not available until 1+ years after publication.
Full text for thousands of peer-reviewed journals and general interest sources across many subject areas.
What's wrong with Googling your topic? Google gives you 25,000,000 hits when you look for your topic.
Is a database better? Yes! It's easier to focus your search to your particular topic and limit your results to academic research.
First of all, start with a strategy:
- write the topic down in the form of a sentence or question
- identify the key concepts of the question
- try to think of at least one or two synonyms for each of these concepts
- if the database you are going to use has a thesaurus (index of subject headings), go there and search for the concepts and synonyms you have thought of. If related terms are suggested, review these, and possibly select and search a few.
- search each of your concepts separately (you can have 2 or more related terms in a concept)
- use the Boolean operators (and, or, not) to combine the results that you get in the previous step
If you are having trouble thinking of search terms, try making a table asking who, what, where, how, or when.
Find journals and newspapers subscribed to by St. Thomas. Enter all or the beginning of the title (e.g., New York Times or Harvard).
