Can't find an article through our libraries' collections? Use Interlibrary Loan (ILL) to request a copy for free.
For off-campus access to library online resources, remember to follow the links from CLIO or this research guide. You can also use the proxy bookmarklet or try LibKey Nomad.
Citation tracking (or citation tracking) is the process of using one relevant paper/article/book to locate additional useful sources. This process works in multiple directions.
You can also look up the author(s) of your sources to see what else they have published. Look up the author’s CV with a full publication list or see if they have a Google Scholar profile.
You can often find full-length review articles by adding the phrase "review of the literature" to your keyword search in databases like EconLit, EconPapers, etc. The following journals only publish review articles.
Africa-Wide Information, produced by NISC South Africa, combines bibliographic databases from around the world to form a multidisciplinary aggregation offering unique and extensive coverage of all facets of Africa and African studies. This includes content from South African Studies, African Studies, and African HealthLine, which focuses on all aspects of health relating to Africa and other developing nations. With over 3.5 million citations and abstracts dating back to the 16th century, this resource is essential for those with an interest in African research, and information on and about Africa.
Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes journals from 1964 to present and includes citations and links to book and media reviews.
EBSCO version: Created by Avery Library, the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals offers a comprehensive listing of journal articles published worldwide on architecture and design, archaeology, city planning, interior design, landscape architecture, and historic preservation. Coverage is from the 1930s (with selective coverage dating back to the 1740s) to the present. The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals is updated weekly.
The EBSCO version of Avery Index includes the local call number for print editions of journals in Avery's collection.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. It is also very useful for seeing if other scholars have cited a book, article, etc. Search on the title, and then follow the "Cited by ..." link.
Boolean searching is based on an algebraic system of logic formulated by George Boole, a 19th century English mathematician.
In a Boolean keyword search, the terms are combined by the operators AND, OR and NOT to narrow or broaden the search (in CLIO, Ovid, and some other databases, you DO have to enter them in capitals). This type of search is possible in most library catalogs and databases, but Google and other Web search engines do not carry out OR and NOT searches properly.
These Venn diagrams help to visualize the meaning of AND, OR and NOT; the colored area indicates the items that will be retrieved in each case.
The operator AND narrows the search by instructing the search engine to search for all the records containing the first keyword, then for all the records containing the second keyword, and show only those records that contain both.
The operator OR broadens the search to include records containing either keyword, or both.
The OR search is particularly useful when there are several common synonyms for a concept, or variant spellings of a word.
Examples using OR:
medieval OR "middle ages"
"heart attack" OR "myocardial infarction"
vergil OR virgil
Combining search terms with the NOT operator narrows the search by excluding unwanted terms.
Examples using combinations of the three operators:
puritans AND women AND (massachusetts OR connecticut OR "rhode island" OR "new hampshire")
(adolescen* OR teen*) AND (cigarettes OR smok*)
reagan AND "star wars" NOT (movie OR film OR cinema OR "motion picture")
"zora neale hurston" AND (correspondence OR letter* OR diar* OR autobiograph* OR memoir*)