Research for Thesis & Dissertation Literature Reviews: Research Article Databases
Identify Relevant Disciplinary Databases
What fields of research are likely to care about your topic? Many research topics are interdisciplinary, so it's important to consider searching disciplinary databases that might have relevant literature.
Searching Databases
Search Terms
- Brainstorm a list of possible search terms related to your topic first.
- Once you start searching, pay attention to the terms authors use in their title and abstracts. Also, view the subject heading assigned to the article; these are the "official" controlled vocabulary the database is using to describe a given idea.
- Be flexible and revise your searches as needed. It's helpful to write down what terms you've used, or save your search history.
Searching Tips
Most all databases have similar search functionalities.
- Quotation marks searches the database for those words together as a term; for example, "social identity".
- An asterisk (*) searches the database for that word plus any variants of the root word. This is called truncation; an example is using the search term work* will provide results that include work OR worker OR workplace, OR worksite. You can also use this for the beginning of the term; *camp will search for camp OR encampment.
- Use the OR search fields to search for synonyms; for example, consider searching for discrimination OR bullying OR harassment.
An example of using these search functions in Sociological Abstracts:
Multidisciplinary Databases
- Google Scholar
This link opens in a new window
Google 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. - JSTORContains full text articles from major research journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Coverage of most journals starts from the beginning of a journal's publication and typically excludes the most recent three to five years.
- Web of ScienceMaintains citation searching for high impact research journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences and includes emerging sources citation indexing from 2005.
Journal Rankings
The following resources can help you answer the following questions, which can be helpful to consider when performing a literature review: What are the top journals in your field? Which journals are the best for your topic?
- EigenfactorFree website ranking and mapping academic journals.
- SCImago Journal & Country RankJournals and country scientific indicators based on data in the Scopus® database.