Find Sources - UGS 302 - Being Social - Curley - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Find Sources on a Topic

Choose a place to search
Keywords for searching a database

For this assignment, you might need several types of sources:

Source Type	Start Here
Scholarly Articles	Library databases, see recommendations below
News Articles	Google News, a specific news site, or Nexis Uni below
Overviews (like a short biography of a historical figure or explanation of a concept)	Encyclopedias, see overviews below

Keyword tool
Use this tool to help you brainstorm keywords on your topic.

Searching databases is different than searching Google. Distil what you're looking for into a few key terms or phrases, rather than whole sentences.

Is the academic achievement of immigrant students impacted by national policy debates on immigration?)

For each main concept, brainstorm a few synonyms and related terms (broader or narrower) that get at that concept:

Key Concepts

immigrant students

academic achievement

policy debates

Related Terms

undocumented students (more specific)

immigrants

learning

academic performance

achievement (more general)

success

academic success

public debate

policy ideas

policy proposals

attitudes (more general/related)

negative attitudes

positive attitudes

Combine key terms using AND and OR:
- AND narrows your search by looking for articles with all of the words (your two or three key concepts should be connected with AND, because you need all of them represented in useful articles).
- OR broadens your search by looking for articles with any of the words (synonyms and related terms should be separated by OR - they get at the same key concepts, so any of them are useful).
Try different combinations of your keywords to get better results as you search.

Recommended Databases for Your Class

Scholarly Articles (mostly) Multidisciplinary Databases

Library search bar - advanced search
The advanced search version of the search bar on the library homepage. Use options to limit to books or to scholarly/peer reviewed articles.

Academic Search Complete
1865 - present. Unlimited users.

Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
JSTOR
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

Scholarly Articles (Mostly) - Subject Databases

SocINDEX with Full Text
1895 - present. Unlimited.
In addition to full-text journals, SocINDEX with Full Text contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895. Includes indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical content sources.
PsycINFO (Ebsco)
1887 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated monthly. Indexes and abstracts over 1,700 sources, including international material selected from periodicals written in over 35 languages. Contains current chapter and book coverage with worldwide English-language material published from 1987 to the present, and adds over 60,000 references annually through monthly updates. Covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines.
Has over 1.8 million individual records, some dating back to 1887, and includes abstracts from Psychological Abstracts back to 1927, Psychological Bulletin from 1921-1926, and all APA journals and the American Journal of Psychology back to their first issues. Corresponds in part to the print index Psychological Abstracts.

Encyclopedias/Overviews

Gale eBooks
Most current edition. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. A database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources. Fully searchable across all files.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

News

Nexis Uni
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
PressReader
60 day archive. 3 users.
Updated daily. Provides a full-color and full-page collection of newspapers from around the world,. Includes over 1000 titles from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States. A 60-day archive is also available to browse by country, language, and newspaper title, and to search full text of articles, photograph captions, and headlines.
Once inside the newspaper, click on a headline to read the article or zoom in to read the article as it appears in print.
We have a limited number of users for this database. Please select the logout option before you leave your session. When the limit is reached, a username and password prompt will probably be displayed. If this happens, simply wait 15 minutes and then try the link again.

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What are databases?

This video, from RMIT University, explains what a database is...

Where's the Article?

If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click FIND IT AT UT to find it in another database or in print in the Libraries.

If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click GET A SCAN to have the article emailed to you. This option will take a few days.