In addition to books, a major source of information is periodicals, that is, magazines, newspapers, and journals. They're called periodicals because they are issued on a regular or "periodic" basis. Whereas books are good for providing comprehensive coverage of a topic, they tend to be broader in scope than some of the research topics you will be assigned in college. Most of the research you conduct will likely be from information found in periodical articles. Periodicals are ideal in the following situations:
Periodicals are usually divided into two groups: scholarly and popular. If you are able to recognize the differences between these types of periodicals, you can focus your research to retrieve only the type of articles you need. View the following video to find out how to distinguish between academic journals (scholarly) and magazines(popular):
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 Premier, 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.
This short tutorial will show you how to use OneSearch to search across all of the library's article databases. The tutorial uses "self-driving cars" as an example, but as you watch the video think about how you can use keywords related to your topic on voting.
This short tutorial will show you how to identify article databases by subject. General databases are a good place to start researching voting issues. You will also find a list of recommended databases in this guide as well as a list of databases that provide the full-text of newspaper articles.
