Find Sources - UGS 303 - Sex, Love, and Relationships in Early Life - McCaslin - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Find Articles on a Topic

Choose a place to search
Keywords for searching a database

Search strategy - Google Doc
Use file-make a copy to copy into your Google Drive, share with your group members!

For this assignment, you might need a few 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.
Books	Start with the library search bar - advanced search. You can limit to books. Use the find books tab. Consider publisher and author as you decide if a book is scholarly. You might only read and use the chapters most relevant to your research.
Journalism/News	The UT libraries has a subscription to the New York times - use the link on the side bar to activate your subscriptions. Can also use Google or the UT Libraries NexisUni database. Make sure to evaluate unfamiliar publications.
Other sources	You may need to use things like legislation, reports from organizations, or other kinds of sources. These are often available on the free web. Make sure you are using the strategies on the evaluate sources tab to help you decide which sources are best for you.

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 Library Databases

Multidisciplinary

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
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
Google Scholar
Unlimited users.
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.

Subject specific

SocINDEX with Full Text
Unlimited users.
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)
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.
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.
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

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!

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.

Guide to government information in the United States

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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.