INTL 349U Gender and International Development: Finding Articles

Once you have a specific topic, it is time to move on to articles. The PSU Library has thousands of individual journal subscriptions that contain millions of academic articles. The best way search this massive collection is through our collection of Databases. There are two types of Database you'll encounter during this project. The first is the subject-specific database, which are designed for researchers in a specific field. The second is are general databases that search across multiple disciplines at once. Each has strengths and weakness. A subject database - about film studies, for example - will include excellent articles about films, but are limited to that topic alone. General databases, like the EBSCO suite of databases, are excellent for interdisciplinary topics, but their broad scope makes it harder to limit search results to a manageable number. For a detailed guide on using AND/OR/NOT commands in our databases, see the Search Techniques guide.

Subject Databases: 

Multidisciplinary Databases:

To assist students in this course, the library created a unique collection of EBSCO databases that can be searched at once.

1) Beginning at the start screen, make sure the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" option is selected.

2) Write your main search terms into each of the boxes, and select "search." 

3) To narrow your results, pay attention to Publication Date.

4) By narrowing your publication date, you can decrease the number of results.

5) If you find an interesting article, select the record. Each record includes an abstract and a link to the article itself.

6) Pay attention to "subject" terms that appear while searching. These terms might help you find additional articles. 

Begin by typing topic key words.

You may end up with may results, but skim the first page or two before moving on.

To limit search results, select the Advanced search

This allows you to search the Abstract. For broad topics, this is an easy way to narrow results. If the topic is too specific, you may get no results.

If this happens, that's fine. Broaden the search a bit and try again.

In addition to the databases listed above, you can also use the library's catalog, "PRIMO," to search for articles.
The search mechanisms used in PRIMO apply to the other databases as well.

1) Begin on the PRIMO start page by typing out your topic. In this case, I'm trying Bollywood AND poverty.  

2) To narrow the search, I limit to "Peer Reviewed Journals."

3) I notice the publication date range of our articles is 1980 to 2019. To further limit our results, let's focus our publication range.

4) Limiting the publication range to the last 20 years, we are down to just over 1,000 articles. Still far too many to skim.

 

5) Going to the "Topic" section of the page, there is a list of subjects and themes that appear within our search results. "Bollywood" is listed as a special subject. Our current results include any article mentioning Bollywood. This option will limit our search specifically to articles about Bollywood.

6) Having limited to "Bollywood" as a subject, we are down to a manageable 40 articles.