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UGS 302 - Science Fiction and Politics - Chapman

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Multidisciplinary Databases...

  • Include popular and scholarly articles on all topics
  • Useful if scholars from multiple disciplines would write about your topic or if you don't know where to start
  • Great for assignments in UGS and other undergraduate courses where you may only need a few sources

Peer review is a process scholarly articles go through before they are published. Scholarly articles are 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 literature don't go through. 

 

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

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

Keywords

 

There are some things you can do to make your database search more successful:

  1. Write down your topic and underline the main concepts 
  2. For each main concept, brainstorm a few synonyms and related terms (broader or narrower) that get at that concept:
    • Key Concepts 

      Science Fiction Political/Economic Concept
      Related Terms

      Science Fiction Literature

      Science Fiction Television

      Specific work or Author

      Capitalism

      International Relations

      Government

      Politics

      War

      Utopia

  3. 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).
  4. Try different combinations of your keywords to get better results as you search.

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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.

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