Find Sources - UGS 302-Climate Change is History - Raby - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Find Articles 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
Books	Main library search bar/library catalog - See the find books tab.
Scholarly Articles	Library databases, see recommendations below
Reports from think tanks and government agencies	Google or on a specific site (like the one for the Brooking Institution). Use recommendations and Google Search Tips below. Make sure to evaluate potential sources.
Journalism/News	Google or the UT Libraries NexisUni database. Make sure to evaluate unfamiliar publications. For historical news articles, access one of the historical newspaper databases. The New York Times is a good choice for national news. The Daily Texan or Austin-American Statesman are good choices for local news.

Search Strategy

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.

Databases and Web Resources for your Class

Library Databases
Web Resources

Books, scholarly articles, and more

Main library search bar - advanced search
This is the advanced version of the search bar on the library homepage. Find books, articles, and more - use the facets on the left side of the page.

Scholarly Articles (mostly)

Articles & More Advanced Search
This is the advanced version of the library Articles & More search.

Academic Search Complete
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
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
Historical Abstracts
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains citations and abstracts of worldwide literature (excluding the United States and Canada) from approximately 2,100 journals and (since 1980) books and dissertations on political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural and intellectual history and related areas of the social sciences and humanities. Covers history dating from 1450 to the present. The database corresponds to the print Historical Abstracts, which was produced by ABC-CLIO.

News/Journalism

Historical Newspapers Databases
These are all of our databases categorized as historical newspapers, including the Daily Texan, the New York times, etc.

Daily Texan
Unlimited users.
Full issues of the student newspaper of UT Austin.
Nexis Uni
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.

Google Search Tips:

Search only a specific site (ex: nih.gov) or domain (ex: .edu or .gov) by typing in your search followed by site:.org, site:.gov (ex: HIV/AIDS prevention site:nih.gov)
Search for an exact phrase by putting your search terms in quotation marks (ex: “over the counter”)

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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.