ESOL 1311 Research Basics: Magazine/Newspaper/Scholarly Articles

To find magazine, newspaper, and scholarly articles you will need to use the Library's Databases. The UTEP Library subscribes to over 300 databases.

Start your search in a multidisciplinary database such as Academic Search Complete or JSTOR.

Then turn to specialized databases such as Business Source Complete, Education Full Text, Health Source: Consumer Edition and PsycINFO depending on your topic. 

It is recommended that when doing research  you develop a search strategy:

1. Choose keywords that describe the important concepts of your research or hypothesis.
2. Determine whether there are synonyms, related terms, or other variations of the keywords that should be included.
3. Determine which search features may apply, including wildcard, Boolean operators, and so on.  See "Searching Tips".
   
4. Choose the appropriate library databases to conduct your searches.  
5. Utilize the database’s limiters to filter your results for the specifications requested by your professor.
6.  Evaluate the results. Modify your search query if needed and repeat steps. Try your search strategy in additional library databases.

 Brake down your research question/statement into concepts and generate key terms to use. Make a list or chart to keep track of terms related to your topic as you start searching for information. Think of synonyms and other terms that can help your capture your key concepts and as you are searching make notes of which terms are useful and which ones are not.

Remember these search tips when using databases:

Quotation marks = search for phrases two or more words: "family homelessness"

Wildcard * =  asterisk sign searches for variations of the term: nutri* will give you results for nutrition, nutritian, nutrients, nutritional

OR = more results. Combine synonyms or similar terms to increase the number of results: "hispanics" OR "latinos"

AND = narrow your results. Combine different concepts to narrow your search: "U.S. poverty" AND "policy"

NOT = excludes terms from your search: "adults" NOT "young adults"

Limiters are pre-selective values in databases that allow you to make your searches more precise. The most common limiters are:

• Scholarly Peer Reviewed – Limits search results to scholarly articles from peer-reviewed journals.
• Date Published – Use this option to search for articles within a specified date range.
• Full Text – Click to limit results to articles with full text.
• Language- Limit results to English or other languages you can read. 
  

 In academia the term "scholarly articles"  refers to reseach articles or review articles published in scholarly journals.  Scholarly articles are legthy , always list authors, are written using the discipline's terminology, and always cite their sources. 

 Most scholarly journals go thru the process of peer-review in which they send the drafts of articles submitted to them to a group of scholars in the discipline prior to publication.

 Academic Search Complete is the most commonly searched database by UTEP undergraduates because it is a multidisciplinary database and links to more relevant and authoritative sources than Google. 

The UTEP Library subscribes to over 70 databases from EBSCO.  Most of them are specialized databases such as Business Source Complete, Education Full Text, Health Source: Consumer Edition and PsycINFO . You can search multiple databases from EBSCO at once, but be aware that each database has their own set of subject terms (term tags) and limiters (pre-selective choices to refine searches).

To find scholarly peer-reviewed  articles you must use a library's database and make sure you limit or refine your results to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed Journals).