Plough Library - How to Research a Topic

Step 4: Look for Magazine,
Newspaper, and Journal Articles

What Are Articles?

Scholarly vs. Popular

Using Databases

Locating Articles

What Are Articles?
Articles appear in periodicals - magazines, newspapers, and journals. An important sources of current information, they often provide more specialized or detailed treatment of a topic than a book might provide. An article can be a five paragraph piece in a popular magazine, or a fifty-page report in a scientific journal.

What kind of article do I need?
Scholarly vs. Popular
Many professors want you to use scholarly articles in your research papers. Understanding the difference between scholarly, popular, and trade publications will save time in your research process.

See below for more about the different types of journals.

Types of Journals

A scholarly or professional journal contains articles by scholars and experts in a specific field who wish to share their research with other professionals. These articles are usually based on original research and contain author credentials, abstracts, and bibliographies (or works cited). Articles in scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, which means they are read and approved by other scholars before they are published. They may also be called refereed publications.
A popular magazine, such as Newsweek or Sports Illustrated, contains current events, news, and general interest articles written by journalists for the general public. Author credentials, abstracts, and bibliographies are not included. There is no peer-review process for popular magazine articles, which are written primarily to inform and entertain.
A third type of publication is the trade publication, which falls somewhere in between scholarly and popular periodicals. Trade publications cover the interests of a particular trade or industry. The authors are usually specialists in an industry who are writing to give practical information to people in their field. Trade publication articles are not peer-reviewed, and usually do not contain author credentials and bibliographies.

See tables below for more information

One way to easily find scholarly articles is to use the search options in EBSCOhost and Infotrac databases to limit your search to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles:

EBSCO Databases offer a limit for "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals"

InfoTrac (Gale) Databases can limit "to peer-reviewed publications"

Or, use this table to help you identify scholarly articles:

How to Recognize Scholarly, Popular, and Trade Articles
	Scholarly	Popular	Trade
Examples	American Economic Review, Journal of Biomechanics, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism	National Geographic, Glamour, New York Times	Advertising Age, Sight and Sound, Industry Week
Author	scholars, researchers, or experts in the field	magazine staff writers or free-lance writers	specialists or practitioners in the profession or industry
Audience	scholars, researchers, professionals, and students	general public	members of a specific profession or industry
Sources	always cite their sources in the form of a bibliography or footnotes	rarely cite sources	occasionally cite sources
Peer-Reviewed	articles are reviewed by an author's peers before publication (refereed)	no peer-review process - articles are reviewed only by an editor or an editorial board	no peer-review process
Advertisements	minimal, select advertising, usually geared towards the discipline	extensive advertising, aimed at the general public	usually contains advertisements that are trade or industry related
Appearance	plain cover and paper, lengthy articles with abstracts, minimal pictures other than graphics within articles	attractive format, glossy paper, short articles with no formal structure, many pictures	attractive format, glossy paper, short to medium-length articles with no formal structure, heavily illustrated

Using Electronic Databases to Find Articles

An electronic database is a periodical index. Just like you use the index at the back of a book to find the specific location of a topic within the book, you use a periodical index to find the specific location of an article within a periodical.

An Electronic Database

	Leads to	A Citation
		Dyer, Christopher. "The English Medieval Village Community and Its Decline." Journal of British Studies. 33.4 (Oct. 1994): 407-430.	Leads to	A Full-Text Article
				"The village community has a shadowy existence in the writings from the Middle Ages..."

Locating Articles

Step 1: Choose your database. The CBU Library Databases page gives you the option to browse databases by title or by subject. If you are unsure of which database to use, go to the Databases by Subject page, and look for an appropriate database for your subject.

Step 2: Search for your article. Most students start their search for information with a keyword search. This is a broad, flexible search and is useful for beginning your research. In the database search box, enter your search terms. Each database has different requirements for combining keywords (i.e. some require you to use the word "AND" between search terms). For more information on how to search your particular database, see the help screens within the database.

Step 3: Choosing your article. After you submit your keywords to the database for searching, you will receive a results list, also known as a citations list. This list gives you important information that you will need to find the actual articles themselves, such as the title of the periodical, the volume number, and the page numbers.

Step 4: Finding your article. Some databases include the full text of the articles along with the citations. If this is the case, then your search is complete - just click on the link for the full text and the entire article will appear. However, sometimes you will only have the citation for the article.

If the database does not have full-text:

Find the full text article
Your next course of action is to see if the full-text article is available in another database. If the "Find the full text article" button displays (in JSTOR, EBSCO and InfoTrac/Gale databases only), simply click on it and this will search the other CBU databases for the full text article. If it is available, follow the link to the article in the alternate database.

Full-Text Periodical Search (A-Z Periodicals List)
If the "Find the full-text article" is not available, then check the A-Z Periodicals List. On the library homepage, under Find Articles, select E-Journals. Enter the title of the journal (not the article) to see if any of our databases have full-text for that journal. If so, click on the link to the database and search for the article there.

Find the Print Version
If the article is not available in any of our databases, that means you will need to find the print version of the article and make a photocopy of it. To do this:

Check the Plough Library catalog, BUC CAT, to see if CBU has print holdings of the periodical for which you are looking.

If Plough Library owns the periodical:		If Plough Library does not own the periodical:
Locate the periodical on the first floor of the library. Periodicals are shelved alphabetically by title.		Search for the periodical in other library catalogs, such as the University of Memphis, or the Memphis Public Library. If no other area library has the article, submit an Article Request Form to our Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Librarian.