Locating Scholarly Journal Articles

Scholarly Journal Articles

For more information about locating articles, go to the Library's research guide on Finding Articles.

The Library subscribes to a number of databases, that lead to scholarly journal articles in the field of international relations. As well as the Academic Search Premier database, Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts are good databases with which to begin your research. For more database suggestions, go to the Library's Database Selector page (http://www.library.sfsu.edu/find/dbs/dbselector.php) and select International Relations as Subject and then select Scholarly research.

Not all articles in these databases will be scholarly. This is especially true of Academic Search Premier. [In Academic Search Premier you may wish to use the "Advanced Search" screen, and be sure and select the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" option to narrow your search to scholarly articles.] Scholarly journal articles always identify the author of the article (usually a professor or affiliate of a major research institute) and include footnotes and/or a bibliography. These articles also tend to be longer than journalistic pieces.

Depending on your topic, databases such as EconLit, Geography, Historical Abstracts, JSTOR and Sociological Abstracts may be useful--they all lead to scholarly journal articles.

For suggestions as to which databases index a particular journal and whether full-text is available, good places to look are the Library's Electronic Journal List (http://sfx.calstate.edu:9003/sfsu/a-z/default) and CUFTS (http://lib-cufts.lib.sfu.ca/CUFTS/sbt.cgi).

Sample Searches for Articles in a Particular Journal

Academic Search Premier:

so international studies quarterly and international relations and theor*

[Alternatively, fill in the "Publication" box.]

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts Advanced Search:

Source (SO=) international security or international organization

and

Keyword (KW=) hegemon*

News and Political Commentary

The Library subscribes to a number of databases that lead to journalistic articles. Some of the most useful full-text databases with which to begin your research are: Academic Search Premier, LexisNexis Academic, Factiva (Dow Jones and Reuters) and ProQuest Newspapers. For a more complete list of relevant databases, go to Library's Database Selector page (http://www.library.sfsu.edu/find/dbs/dbselector.php) and select News as Subject.

J. Paul Leonard Library/AK/1/26/07