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COMM 101 Trenary: Find articles

Outward differences between popular magazines and scholarly journals

Identifying Primary Vs. Secondary Research Articles

Keyword search using broad-to-narrow strategy

Keywords:  ​public communication         ethics

public communication= 4000+ results.

Add ethics = 100+ results. Notice your results are now much more specific.

  • Limit to scholarly journals. Checkmark the Peer Reviewed box on the left side of your screen.
  • Do the same to limit to Full Text (articles that you can access immediately)
  • Which of these are original research studies? Tip: find the METHOD section.
  • Use the date limiter to weed out very old articles. Try to find articles published within the last ten years or so.

Communication & Mass Media Complete database allows you to search through almost 1000 communication-specific news and research publications. 

SU Databases


A-Z list and by subject

Your topic may concern subject areas such as education, health, history, etc. You may consider searching within databases that contain articles that were published in subject-specific journals.

Academic Search Complete  Academic Search Complete is the world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. 
 
MasterFILE Premier Provides abstracts and indexing for 2,650 general periodicals. Full text of articles for nearly 2,000 periodicals, and 5,000 full text Magill Book Reviews. 
 
JSTOR This is a general interdisciplinary databases that covers many topics. JSTOR specializes in providing full text articles going back to the earliest issues of a journal. It has only scholarly journals, not popular magazines.
 

MAS Fulltext Ultra Full-text for over 500 popular general interest and current events publications, as well as 253 full text reference books, nearly 100,000 biographies, 76,000 primary source documents, and an image collection of 116,000 photos, maps and flags.

  • Com Abstracts - citations to articles in Communications Journals.  From this page, choose Com Abstracts in the top right-hand corner to search the database.
  • Communication & Mass Media Complete - Full-text and citations for many journals and magazine articles about communication and media topics. 
  • CQ Weekly - Congressional Quarterly Weekly -  your opportunity to find out what's going on in Congress!
  • Contemporary Women's Issues - would be good for topics relating to women.
  • ERIC - "Education Resources Information Center," a database with full text education articles and ERIC documents as well as Find It links to non-full text resources.
  • Humanities International Complete - database covering the Humanities with quite a few Communications journals included.
  • PsycINFO - the gold standard database for psychology and related fields.
  • Social Sciences Abstracts - articles and citations for interdisciplinary fields such as addiction studies, anthropology, corrections, economics, gender studies, gerontology, minority studies, political sciences, psychology, sociology, and more.