Current magazines, journals and newspapers are your source for the most recent research or commentary an a particular topic. They also tend to be very narrow in focus. You find articles by searching databases.
Whenever you see the eye symbol,
there is a live example of the search... Just click the eye to see the result!
You may have noticed that some of the words in the example searches above are cut off before they end, and are finished with an asterisk (*). This is called truncation and makes the database search for ALL FORMS of the word you are looking for.
EXAMPLES:
medic* will retrieve medic, medical, medicine, medication, medicate, medicated, etc.
schizophren* will retrieve schizophrenic, schizophrenia, schizophrenics, etc.
It's a great time saver!
As with reference books, you will have a choice of general databases or subject-specific. You will need to search for key words as you did with books - but you can be much more specific with articles. Remember: there are many, many more articles in the world than books.
IMPORTANT TIP: ALWAYS use the word AND in between dissimilar terms when searching article databases!
Examples:
This multi-disciplinary database has records for nearly 18,000 periodicals - journals, magazines, and newspapers - of which nearly 16,000 are peer reviewed. It provides full text for more than 5,000 journals, and you can use Journal Finder to locate articles that do not have a PDF readily available.
This database is the APA's renowned resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books and dissertations. PsycINFO is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health, with ninety-nine percent of the covered material peer-reviewed. Topics included are Pharmacology, Psychiatry, Business, Education, and Law. Currently indexes over 2,500 journals. Articles for which full-text is not available can be ordered via interlibrary loan.
A Definitive Source of Full-Text, Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Articles in Psychology from the American Psychological Association (APA). This full-text psychology database contains articles from highly-cited and landmark journals published by the APA, its imprint the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF), and from allied organizations including the Canadian Psychological Association and the Hogrefe Publishing Group. Content from over 100 journals.
