Skip to Main Content

English: Find Articles and Journals

Using search Keywords

Keywords are just as useful searching databases as they were in the Library Catalog. Databases tend to have much more content than the catalog, so search terms can be combined to find more precise resources.

Tips that work for most Databases.

  • Use AND, OR, and NOT to join keyword terms versus assuming that the search engine will apply ones you want
  • Use parentheses to group terms with Boolean terms to distinguish sets of ANDs and ORs
  • Asterisk (*) stands for multiple characters. Most databases only allow * on the end of a term. JStor and Wiley allow * to stand before or embedded in a word.

EXAMPLE: war* = war, wars, warring, warlord, etc.

  • Question marks (?) stand for single character replacement.

EXAMPLE: wom?n = woman, women

  • Use double quotation marks around a phrase that you want to search exactly as typed. Some databases will ignore "stop words" such as 'a', 'the', etc. regardless of quotation marks.
  • Use Author, Title, and Abstract search narrowing to find items more specific to your topic. Be careful when using Abstract because not every article contains one.

English Databases

Other Online Resources

  • HathiTrust
    • Digitized materials from academic and research institutions from around the globe
  • New Pages
    • A constantly-updated collection of online and print literary magazines.
  • Representative Poetry Online
    • "Representative Poetry Online, edition 6.0, is a web anthology of 4,800 poems in English and French by over 700 poets spanning 1400 years."
  • Lost Poets of the Great War
    • A collection of poems from World War I.
  • Pew Research Center
    • "A nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research."
  • Cultural Politics
    • "A site designed to offer resources for the analysis of the role of culture in shaping our political, economic, and social lives. Cultural politics understands culture - popular culture/mass media, folk culture and the arts."
  • Library of Congress Digital Collections
    • Digitized collections from the Library of Congress.
  • Duke University Ad*Access
    • "Over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955."
  • Georgia State University Southern Labor Archives
    • "The documentary heritage of Southern workers and their unions, as well as that of workers and unions having a historic relationship to the region"
  • American Folk Art Museum Digital Collections
    • Digitized collection of American folk art