Key Scholarly Article Databases
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America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
Index to research on the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. Indexes articles and book reviews from more than 1,700 journals published in more than 40 languages. Dates of Coverage: 1964 to date
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Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Index to thousands of academic journals covering world history (excluding the US and Canada) from 1450 to present, in over 40 languages, with full-text available. Dates of Coverage: 1955 to date
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JSTOR This link opens in a new windowScholarly journal archive for the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences; current issues (usually the last 2-5 years) are not digitized by JSTOR and may be obtained elsewhere.
Keyword Brainstorming
Keywords, or search terms, are words that represent the main concepts in a research question. In history research, it is particularly important to be aware of whether you are looking for primary or secondary sources, and whether you are searching a full-text search tool (e.g. JSTOR, Search Libraries, a full text newspaper database) or one where you are searching metadata such as titles or subject headings (e.g. an image database, worldcat or another library catalog). The same keywords will work differently in different search tools.
Basic Database Search Techniques
| Concept | Explanation | Example |
| Phrase search (quotes required) |
search for an exact phrase (most, but not all, databases use quotation marks) | “death penalty” “standardized test” “reality TV” |
| Boolean logic (for keyword searching) | use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) for more precise searching |
See following examples |
| AND | search for records that have all of the words (narrows the search) |
race and poverty drug use and educational attainment |
| OR | search for records that have any of the words (broadens the search) |
homosexual or gay or lesbian or queer china or japan or korea |
| NOT | exclude records that have the word (narrows the search) | advertising not (TV or television) |
| Truncation | search for a root word with any ending (most, but not all, databases use an asterisk *) | adolescen* [finds adolescent, adolescents, adolescence] |
Additional Database Techniques
| Concept | Definition | Example |
| Complex Boolean Search | place search words for the same concept in the same search box (or in parentheses) |
(spous* or wife or wives or husband* or domestic partner*) and (abus* or batter* or violen*) |
| Proximity | require words to appear within a certain distance of each other n (for “near”) = words can appear in any order w (for “within”) = words must appear in specified order | poverty n4 mental health african w2 american* (n# and w# indicate the maximum number of intervening words) note: if no quotes or proximity connectors or are used, Ebsco defaults to w5 |
| Field qualification (field limiting) | require words to appear in a certain field in the database record (easy way: use dropdown menus) |
au coleman (for author field) ti racial profiling (for title field) |
| Limit (filter) | restrict search results to a subset of the database | e.g., by language, year of publication, type of publication |
| Add to folder | select or save records from search results for future action | save specified records to display, print, email, or add to bibliographic manager (e.g., RefWorks) later |