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COMM 260 Han: Find articles

Identifying Primary Vs. Secondary Research Articles

Tip: Scroll through the article to find the Method section.

Keyword search using broad-to-narrow strategy

Practice searching using the following sequence of keywords from our example research topic.

  1. nonprofit or non-profit or not for profit          
  2. wages or salary or income or pay           
  3. disparities or disparity or inequities or inequality or bias or disproportionality 
  4. women

Open Communication & Mass Media Complete 

Select the Choose Databases link above the search box. Select the check box at Select All to select all Ebsco databases.

Search  nonprofit or non-profit or not for profit. This yields over 60,000 results. This yields over 60,000 results -a very healthy number to work within.

Add wages or salary or income or pay. This narrows results to 3719 articles that are more specific.

Add disparities or disparity or inequities or inequality or bias or disproportionality. This narrows your results to 132 articles that are very specific.

  • Limit to scholarly journals. Checkmark the Peer Reviewed box on the left side of your screen.

  • No link to "Full Text?" The Find It button searches for the article in our other databases.

  • Limit publication date to last 10 years?

  • Use the citation generator and download or permalink to document what you find.

Find library databases by subject

In addition to searching general databases, use this link to see specialized databases containing subject-specific journals in areas like business, education, health, history, etc.

Screenshot of the A-Z Databases page displaying the Databases by Subject drop menu.

1. To search mulitple databases at once and increase your results, click on Choose Databases and Select All. 

2. Try a search for Starbucks. This search yields over 48,000 results, but only some are research articles.

3. You need research articles, so on the left side of the search screen under Limit To,  checkmark Peer Reviewed. This limits your results to 2,602 research articles.

4. Starbucks wasn't around in 1837, also limit by Publication Date to last ten years. This yields 1221 research articles about Starbucks that have been published within the last ten years.

Tips for browsing research articles:

In the article record, find the Abstract. This is a brief paragraph that tells you what an article is about.

The left side of the article record screen also contains links to the citation generator and Permalink, which can help you to document and retrieve an article at a later time.

Within the article itself,  scroll halfway through the article to make sure it contains a Method section. 

It is nicely straightforward to use Google Scholar just by itself if you want to do a basic search across several search engine/databases that do not otherwise interact with each other.  To make sure that you are accessing all of the resources that we pay for, however, you need to make sure that you have added Salisbury University as our library before you begin searching.  Doing this is extremely easy - just follow the steps below!

 

1.). Navigate your way to Google Scholar and look for the three-bar "stack" in the upper left hand corner.  This is where you will find the Settings option.  

2.  Under Settings, choose the Library links option.  This will open up a new window with an empty box in it.  In that box, type in Salisbury University, and then hit the 'search' button.  

3.  Once you have done that, two additional checkbox options will appear below the search box - both listing options for Salisbury University.  Check them both off, then hit Save.  

Now you are good to go!  You can start searching for whatever it is that you are looking for, and your search results will be displayed in a "regular" Google-like way.  But this time, you will see any full-text links that are available through SU Libraries linked to the right of the article title, and clicking on that right-hand link will take you to the SU login/SU-provided full text access!