How Do I Find Articles

Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii; name="template.html" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline; filename="template.html" How Do I Find Articles

How do I find articles on a topic?

Selecting your Topic & Identifying Keywords
Choose a Database
Searching the Database
Locating the Article

1. Selecting your Topic & Identifying Keywords

Selecting your topic
Selecting a research topic is perhaps the most difficult part of doing research. When choosing a research topic, select a topic that you're curious about or one you like. If the topic is a very broad subject, you may need to focus your research on a particular area or aspect of that broad topic. For example, if you chose education as your topic, you could be researching for days because the topic education covers a huge amount of information. If you're still interested in that topic, choose a smaller area or subgroup of education, like preschool education or distance education. Narrowing down your topic to a particular area or subtopic will make it easier to research and write by the date your assignment is due.

Identifying keywords
Think about your topic, and pick out the main ideas or concepts in the topic. Then express each concept as an individual term or phrase. For example, your topic sentence might be "What is the effect of television violence on children?" The concepts or ideas in that sentence would be effect, television violence, and children. These terms or phrases are called keywords, and are the terms you'll use to search databases for articles and information on you topic.

2. Choose a Database

After you've decided on your topic and selected the keywords you'll use to do your research, you need to choose a database(s) to search. The best way to find a good database is to go to the Pitt Digital Library at http://www.library.pitt.edu , and click on Databases by Subject, listed under the Find Articles & More heading. Next, click on the subject you need, and you'll access a list of databases containing articles and information in that subject. If you're unsure which subject or which database to select, a reference librarian can help you choose the best databases for your research.

3. Searching the Database

The databases you will search have millions of articles and citations. If your keyword search is too general, you may end up with thousands of search results you'll have to wade through to find the information you want. Nobody has that kind of time, so you have to search smart. Here's how to use such searching techniques as the linking words called Boolean operators, truncation, and nesting to combine search terms.

Operators
Boolean operators are the linking words and, or, not that let you to link more than one topic or keyword together. Don't worry about the funky name, but these linking words will help you save research time by focusing your search to more of what you're looking for. Here's how they work:

Selecting the citations you want
If the database you're searching offers the full text of articles you chose, you're in luck. You can print the articles, download them to a floppy disk, or email them to your email account. The instructions on how to do these things are in the database's help screens. But what do you do if all you have is a citation? When you find a citation you like that doesn't have the full article, the next step is to find out if the Pitt libraries have that journal.

My professor said no Web pages, but the article is on the Web!

Why aren't all indexes full-text?

4. Locating the Article

Many of the ULS databases offer the full text of the articles, but some databases may not offer full text articles. When you find a citation you like but doesn't have the full article, the next step is to find out if the Pitt libraries have that journal.

Access PITTCat at http://pittcat.pitt.edu, and go to the Author/Title search screen. Type the magazine or newspaper title in the Search for: text box. If the title starts with an article (like the, a, an, de, la, el ), drop the article and type in the rest of the title. For example, to find the magazine titled Ecological Research, you would type ecological research. Next, select the type of search you are going to do in the Search by: menu to the right of the Search for: text box. To start your search, click on the gray Search button at the bottom of the screen.

Search results will show a list of all magazines or newspapers with the title ecological research. Each entry will list a title and, to the right, on which campus that item is located. Below the item title, most entries will indicate which library it is in. To see the full catalog record, click on the Full Title of the item.

The catalog record will give you all the information you would need to locate that item. You will be given a description of the item, location information like the library and collection the item is in, which volumes and issues are available, and if there is an electronic subscription to the journal. If you want the ejournal, just click on the Web Access URL in the catalog record. For the paper journal, write down the location information - you'll need this to go find the journals on the library shelves.