There are many ways of finding great articles and books for your research. We discuss finding company research here, finding and choosing databases here, and taking advantage of RSS feeds in databases here. But there is one way of finding articles that many students overlook, and it involves looking at the bibliography of other articles.
Just like you have to write a bibliography or works cited list for your own papers, so do the writers of scholarly articles. This is often a very good place to start. Perhaps you were assigned to read an article in class, or you've already found one really good article in your research. You can look up the resources that the writer of that article used, and use them yourself. This is not cheating, it's just being smart.
In order to do this successfully, you're going to need to be able to identify which resources are books and which ones are journals. Just remember journals will list an article title in quotes, along with a journal title underlined or italicized (usually) along with volume and issue numbers. Books will generally list the title, and authors or editors, but they won't list volume or issue numbers. Here are two examples:
Ashley, Bob. The Study of Popular Fiction. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989.
Bacarisse, Pamela. "Superior Men and Inferior Reality: Manuel Puig's Pubis Angelical." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 66.4 (1989):361-70.
The first example is a book; there is nothing in quotes, and no volume numbers or issue numbers. The second one lists an article title "Superior Men and Inferior..." and a journal title, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, along with volume and issue numbers, 66.4 right after the journal name.
Occasionally you'll have a citation that looks similar to a journal citation, but is actually an anthology (a collection of articles or book excerpts in one book). In this case, you'll still have an article title in quotes and a book title underlined or italicized, but there won't be a volume or issue number.
Once you're determined that you're looking for a book, look it up in our online catalog. To learn how click here.
If you're looking for a journal article, find out first if we have the journal by typing in the title on our Find Journals and Newspapers by Title link, which you can find on the homepage and links here.
Comments