Strategy: Use what you have to find more like it.
One of the best ways to learn the scholarship in an area is to look at the notes and bibliographies of secondary work you're reading.
- Search for the titles of these books in Catalyst.
- Search for the names of journals using our Journals List.
Databases: Multidisciplinary
- Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
Contains scholarly journals, trade publications, and magazines from across the disciplines and from popular culture. Much of the content is available in full text. An ELM Database. - Project MUSE This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and the full text)
Search through the full text of key books and journals from across the disciplines, with emphasis on recent scholarship. - JSTOR This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and the full text)
Provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Most journals are included from their first issue until 5 years ago.
Strategy: Search Catalyst for Articles and Books
Search for articles and books from our library...
Catalyst will search across many journal and reference databases as well as our library catalog. It is a great way to start looking through published literature to find journal articles, reference sources, images, newspaper articles, and more.
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This will return results for books and articles. Use the facets to the left of the results to refine your results. You can refine article results by:
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type of article
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topic
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language
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year of publication
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To get to the full text of an article, click the "Online Access" link
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Search using just a few important words at a time for best results.
Strategy: Search a database
Why search a single database? Well, databases are more targeted than using Catalyst, but still allow us to search several journals at the same time. So, instead of browsing through individual journals, year by year, or sorting through many results that are not relevant, we can search a database for more targeted articles. The downside? Databases can be finicky and can require some finessing.
For your research, you may not find any articles specifically about your community within Minnesota. It will likely be necessary to think more broadly about your topic, and find ways to apply scholarship out there to your specific site.
Some other tips:
-> Start with keyword searches; Look carefully at subject tags of relevant articles/books; incorporate these into your other searches.
-> Use the limit and advanced search features if you're getting a large number of results or if the results you are getting don't make sense.
-> Search for the name of an author you know writes on this topic to find more people who write on this topic.
