COMM 300 - Principles of Communication: Find Scholarly Articles
Core Databases for Articles
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Communication Source This link opens in a new windowProvides abstracts and indexing as well as full-text content from global titles pertaining to many fields of communication studies.
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PsycINFO This link opens in a new windowMaintains citations and abstracts for journal articles, books, and dissertations in psychology about human behavior from 1879 to the present. Nearly 2500 journals are indexed in PsycINFO, and the database is updated weekly.
Related Databases
Since Communication can be interdisciplinary, you may need to search databases in other subjects, such as sociology, business, political science, etc.
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Gender Studies Database This link opens in a new windowCombines Women's Studies International and Men's Studies databases. Provides citations to journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, government reports, and working papers as well as theses and dissertations.
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Worldwide Political Science Abstracts This link opens in a new windowIndexes articles related to political institutions, international law and politics, public policy, public administration, political theory, and political economics. Indexes sources from 1975 to the present.
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PubMed (Interface for MEDLINE) This link opens in a new windowProvides citations and abstracts for journal articles in all areas of medical practice and research from 1953 to the present.
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Business Source Premier This link opens in a new windowProvides full text and citations to articles in various business publications; also includes company profiles, industry profiles, and country information.
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Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowIndexes citations to journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and conference proceedings in the field of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences.
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Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) This link opens in a new windowIndexes journal citations and other publications covering all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
Tips for Keyword Searching
Construct your search using the keywords and/or phrases relevant to your topic.
- Use OR to search both keywords/phrases
- Quotation marks can be used to search for phrases (e.g. "infant development")
- Truncation searches for variants of a word. Use an asterik (*) at the root (e.g. play* searches for play, plays, playing, player, etc.)
- AND combines the search components to find results with both components in the record
Keyword searching is beneficial particularly when there is a new area of research that has not been assigned a subject heading yet. For example, research on "microaggressions" is fairly new, and the APA has not yet established the term as a formal subject in the database.
Multidisciplinary Databases
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Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new windowProvides selected full text, scholarly, and peer reviewed articles in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
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Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowGoogle Scholar searches the academic, scholarly Web for peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles. Searching Google Scholar from the Portland State University Library will identify full text articles available from PSU Library resources as well as open access articles from other universities and colleges.
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Web of Science This link opens in a new windowMaintains citation searching for high impact research journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences and includes emerging sources citation indexing from 2005.
The Peer Review Process Video
3 minute video on the peer review process, created by the North Carolina State University Libraries: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/tutorials/pr/
Find it @ PSU
Our article databases are enabled with a Find It @ PSU green button which connects you from the database you are searching to the holdings of specific articles in our Library.
If the article citation in your search results does not include a link to the full text PDF file, use the green Find It @ PSU button to check online or print availability via the Library catalog.
If the PSU Library does not hold the article online, you can request it through Interlibrary Loan & Article Delivery.
