Find Sources - UGS 303: Crises Causes/Consequences - Tompaidis - 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
Scholarly Articles	Start with the library search bar - advanced search. Try the "peer reviewed" limit. You can also use the recommended library databases 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 News or the UT Libraries NexisUni database, or the UT Libraries access to the New York Times. The Texas Tribune is also freely available online. Make sure to evaluate unfamiliar publications.
Legislation	Access Texas legislation at Texas Legislature Online. You can search by keyword, but another strategy is to search for important legislation you read about in a news article.

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

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 This link opens in a new window
1990 - 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 This link opens in a new window
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

Subject-Specific Databases

Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
1955 - present. 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.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
1990 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated monthly. A scholarly business database providing a collection of bibliographic and full text content in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Indexing and abstracts for scholarly business journals back to 1886 are included.

Searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals. Contains detailed author profiles for the 20,000 most-cited authors in the database.

Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses.

News/Journalism

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
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.

All Historical Newspaper Databases
This links to all of the historical newspaper databases UT Libraries subscribe to. Single newspapers like the New York Times might be particularly useful.
New York Times Access
As a UT student, you have free unlimited access to the New York Times (including Cooking, Games, and The Athletic) at nyt.com. This access to the NY Times is provided by the UT Libraries. Your access to the NY Times is directly through the site and/or the app, which makes the reading experience easier and more enjoyable.

The New York Times provides invaluable coverage of national and world events, and is often considered the "paper of record." Reading a paper and being an informed citizen makes doing research in every subject easier. Take advantage of this access while you're here at UT!
Texas Tribune
Non-profit news source focusing on Texas.

Legislation

Texas Legislature Online
Government Documents guide
Use this guide for help accessing US laws and legislative history and other government documents.

Google News
Congressional Research Service
A non-partisan government agency that creates reports on important issues for legislators.
Brookings Institution
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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.