Find Background Information and Scholarly Articles - UGS 303: Seeking Justice in the Constitution - Gregg - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Databases and Web Resources for your Class

Find Scholarly Articles - UT Libraries Databases
Find Background Information

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.

Note: If you want to get an item we do not have access to online, look for the Get a Scan button. You can typically get it in a few days. use chat if you need help with this.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Scholarly and popular articles on a variety of topics.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Find scholarly articles, mostly in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Also includes some books and other materials.
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
HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
Scholarship in law review journals.
Updated regularly. Provides a collection of legal periodicals, reproducing the original image of each article. Includes over 1,200 law review journals containing more than 600,000 articles from 21,000 volumes.

Also provides access to the following:
- Federal Register
- Statutes at Large (the official source for the laws and resolutions passed by Congress, browseable by volume, popular name or treaty)
- U.S. Supreme Court Library
Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Restricted to current UT students, faculty and staff. Not available to Official UT Retirees
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
If you like Google Scholar, that is a fine tool to use. The library link will connect you with some of the subscriptions the library pays for.
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.

Gale eBooks This link opens in a new window
Encyclopedia articles contain general facts and basic overviews. Check with your professor before citing an encyclopedia article, as they are not peer-reviewed scholarly sources.
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

Oyez (from Chicago-Kent College of Law)
Simple, brief summaries of supreme court cases. Good for getting the basics of a case you've seen mentioned in passing.

Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints This link opens in a new window
1980 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Provides full text access to differing points of view on current social issues. Brings together viewpoint articles, contextual topic overviews, government and organizational statistics, biographies of social activists, court cases, profiles of government agencies and special interest groups, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as links to more than 1,800 reviewed and subject-indexed web sites.

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

Source Type	Start Here
Scholarly Articles	The library databases, see recommendations above
Background Information	Gale eBooks for encyclopedia articles; web resources like oyez for overviews of cases

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.

Freedom of religion and public religious monuments

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

Key Concepts

Freedom of Religion

Public religious monuments

Related Terms

First amendment

Freedom of speech

separation of church and state

Public monuments

10 commandments

Temple of Satan

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.

Source Examples

The New Governors: the People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech
This is an example of a scholarly article from a law review. Remember to evaluate the credibility of the law review (what is its reputation? what kind of quality control or peer review does it have?) before using this type of scholarship.
Shifting the Metaphor: Examining Discursive Influences on the Supreme Court's Use of the Marketplace Metaphor in Twenty-First-Century Free Expression Cases
This is an example of a scholarly article from a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Encyclopedia of the First Amendment: Hair Length and Style
This is an encyclopedia article. This type of article is useful for finding background information, but it is NOT a scholarly source because it has not been peer-reviewed and it is more general than a research-based scholarly article.

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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.