Research Guides
Research GuidesEssays in books or journal articles will tend to be fairly narrowly focused, so it may be best to look for these after you have a sense of your topic. If your searching returns 10,000 results, you'll likely want to narrow your topic a bit. If a search returns NO results, either you'll need to work on your terminology OR - congratulations, no one else has had the idea you have!
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Indexes |
Full-Text Broader results, less focused. Much higher granularity, and good for identifying theoretical approaches. |
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| General Helpful for beginning research, and for interdisciplinary topics. |
Academic Search Premier ProQuest Research Library WorldCat |
JSTOR Project Muse ScholarSearch Science Direct Google Scholar |
| Discipline-Specific |
America: History and Life ATLA Religion Index Education Research Complete Historical Abstracts MLA Bibliography (APA) PsycInfo |
AnthroSource ProQuest Sociology PsycArticles |
Often the key to successful searching is finding the right terms to search.
Literature reviews try to summarize the research that has been done within the previous year(s). There are a few works that are devoted only to reviews of the literature. These include:
To locate literature reviews within a specific discipline, add:
"literature review" OR "review of the literature"
to a subject search within a specialized database such as those listed in the section at the top of this page. Warning: except in history, it's possible that the focused topic you're working on does not have an explicit literature review. In that case, try to place your subject within a broader or more theoretical context.
If you are searching in Scholar Search, you will see both books and articles.
Some databases have full text incorporated in them; almost all of our databases, however, are connected to "Find it @Drew" which will check all our electronic journal sources to see if an article is available.
If the articles are directly connected into the database, it will give you a direct link to the PDF or HTML or Linked full text; some items will be not in our collection and you'll be directed to request them through Interlibrary Loan.
For many, you'll need to click Find it @Drew to see whether it's available electronically:
When you click Find it @Drew you will be taken to a page that will offer you a list of links to the resource in our electronic journal holdings. (Sometimes we have a journal article via more than one database; that's why you see multiple links. Click one of the links to get to the full text:
If we don't have access to the journal/article online, Find it @Drew will give you links
NOTE: The first time you request an article or book via ILLiad (our InterLibraryLoan system), you will be asked to fill out a short form. It may take several days to receive an article via InterLibraryLoan; books can take longer.
If you already have information about a specific article (author, journal or magazine title, title of the article, etc.), use Drew's Journal List Search. Enter the title of the journal or magazine, and then drill down to the specific item you need.
There are basically two types of searches:
Questions? Need Help? Email reference@drew.edu
Drew University Library, https://drew.edu/academic/student-resources/library/