Find Sources for your Research - UGS 303: Black Austin Matters - Reddick & Thompson - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Step 1: Brainstorm Search Terms (Keywords)

Library databases and Google can't be searched the same way so take a few moments to come up with a search strategy before diving into a database.

Step 1: Think about the key concepts of your topic and search those instead of an entire phrases or sentences.

Step 2: Think of other terms you could use that are synonyms or related (they could be a broader or narrower aspect). This often requires that you do a little background research to learn more.

Step 3: Connect your terms using AND and OR:

Remember -

AND narrows your topic (use AND between terms if you want them all to appear in your results)
OR broadens your topic (use OR between terms if you want any, not all, to appear in your results)

Generate Keywords from a Topic
This tool can help you create search terms and formulate an effective search.

Step 2: Pick a Tool and Find Sources

HistoryMakers This link opens in a new window
Oral histories from across the US. You can search for Texas or Austin Texas to narrow it down.
This resource’s unique content is primarily composed of video oral histories recording the African American experience in the first-person. Testimonies captured in The HistoryMakers Collection interviews are conducted in homes and offices across the United States and abroad. The interviews reveal the broad scope of narratives of African American men and women who have made significant contributions to American life, history, and culture during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

These sites are helpful for picking a person you would interview for a podcast.

Allgo

Statewide queer people of color organization
Austin African American Resource Advisory Commission

Look at agendas for commissioners names. May be good if you're interested in gentrification issues.
Black Leaders Collective

Collective to address many areas, including health and education.
Celebrating Austin's Black History

From the Parks Department. Includes historical and current leaders.
Greater Austin Black Chamber of Commerce

Business leaders

Austin American Statesman in Newspaper Source Plus database
Find the Austin American Statesman to 2019. The Statesman is our major daily here in Austin and covers Central Texas, including political reporting.
- Note: Not all articles through are avaiable full text. For articles after 2019, search the Statesman website - not everything is paywalled.
- Search tip include Austin American-Statesman in a search box and change the drop down to SO Journal name
Austin Business Journal
Business news in Austin. Ask a librarian if you can't access articles.
Austin Chronicle
This is our city's free weekly. It very apparently skews to the left of the political spectrum, but is a valuable resource for local issues.
TIP: From the menu, click on More and then Archives to search past issues
The Austin Villager
Free weekly newspaper serving the black community. Search or click on Archives and browse issues.
Community Impact
This paper comes to many homes for free and has a surprising amount of coverage and data for local issues. Choose your location for very specific content. Covers Austin, Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth metro areas.
Daily Texan Archive
Seach older issues of the Daily Texan here, as well as searching their website for newer articles.
Google Custom Search: Austin Local Information
News, statistics, law/crime, and more
Texas Observer
Texas nonprofit news source.
Texas Standard
Daily news show for Texas broadcast on our public radio
Texas Tribune
Nonprofit news source inTexas

Libraries Search Box
Search across many of the Libraries electronic and print resources at once. Includes articles, books, ebooks and more.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Articles from scholarly and popular sources across all disciplines
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.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Use GoogleScholar through this guide or the Libraries web site to access our subscriptions instead of hitting a paywall.
Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.
Race Relations Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Journal articles pertinent to race relations from across disciplines
Includes more than 49,500 bibliographic records covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
Education Source This link opens in a new window
Journal articles in the field of education
The collection includes full text for more than 1,700 journals, 550 books and monographs, education-related conference papers, citations for over 4 million articles including book reviews and over 100,000 controlled and cross-referenced names of educational tests. Coverage in Education Source spans all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and also includes educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education and testing.
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Newspapers, magazines and journals from the ethnic press in the US (includes Black, LatinX, Native American, and more)
Updated monthly. Provides full-text coverage of newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press in America (some international coverage). Includes more than 400,000 full-text articles from 200 publications.

All African American Studies Article Databases

Where is 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.

Scholarly Journal Articles

Peer Review

You may be asked to look for peer-reviewed, research, scholarly, referred or academic articles - all names for the same type of source. What are they? These articles go through the peer-review process before they are published. A scholar/researcher/professor submits their article to a journal and it is sent to other experts in the field (peers) to ensure that they contain high-quality, original research important to the field. This is a measure of quality control other types of articles don't go through.

If you can't tell whether or not a journal is peer-reviewed, check Ulrichsweb.

access the database
type in the title of the journal
peer-reviewed journals will have a referee jersey ("refereed" is another term for "peer-reviewed") - example below