You can find thousands of articles in magazines and journals in the library's databases. What is a database? A collection of the online versions of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles that can be searched and accessed online.
For this assignment I recommend:
Academic Search Complete: a multi-disciplinary database includes peer-reviewed articles.
CQ Researcher: Each 12,000-word report on a current issue is written by an experienced journalist and features comments from experts, lawmakers, and citizens on all sides of every issue.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context: Covers todays hottest issues. Informed, differing views help you develop critical thinking skills and draw your own conclusions.
If you are off campus, you will see a login page at this point prompting you to enter your student ID. Once you are in the database, you can search for articles and then download or email them to yourself.
If you come up short in the library's databases, you might try searching Google Scholar. Most articles are not available full text, but it is possible to link to Foothill's collection. Go to Scholar Preferences in the upper right-hand corner of the Google Scholar site and make sure Foothill College is selected under library links.
View the following video to learn how to find out how a peer-reviewed article is different from a typical magazine article.
When you're searching in one of our online databases, it's easy to limit your search to peer-reviewed journals. For example, in Academic Search Complete, there's an option on the main search page under "Limit your results" to limit the search to scholarly (peer reviewed) journals:
You can also limit your results after you've done a search by clicking the Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals box in the left margin next to the results:
Keep in mind that not everything appearing in a peer-reviewed journal is a peer-reviewed article; there are also book reviews, editorials, etc.