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"An article that is going to help you is not one that agrees with what you're saying but one that you have something to say about."
If you are in doubt, ask your professor what kinds of periodicals s/he prefers you to use for the assignment.
Magazines & Newspapers: Called popular periodicals, they are written by staff writers and report current events and news for general readers.
Journals: Often called scholarly or academic and written by practitioners, theorists & educators, they report experimental and/or theoretical research. Peer-review: Experts in the field may review articles before publication.
This collection allows you to search across multiple databases to find articles about a topic from multiple perspectives.
Want to focus on a single discipline? You may search many of these as a single database. From the library homepage, click the big blue Articles & Databases button to see A to Z lists of all library databases and to select databases by discipline.
This set of databases is best for topical searches and, for most searches, it will find more journal articles.
Select 2 or 3 key words or phrases that you would expect to find in articles about your topic.
AND finds ALL words; add more words with AND to find less.
After you search, from the left-side menu you may limit your search results in several ways. The 2 most popular are:
By publication date (All search examples below limited to articles published in 2012 to 2022)
By source types, e.g. to magazine or journal articles.
OR finds ANY word; Find mORe by using multiple spellings of a word or synonyms; enter the words in the same search box with OR
st. louis or saint louis
school or education
The asterisk finds variant endings of a word: immigra* finds immigration, immigrant(s)
Or, you may wish to change the focus of the search. Below I've removed the search words for St. Louis and am instead focusing on ESL or 'English as a second language" instruction. I've also limited the search results to peer-reviewed publications (e.g. journals).
Read the abstract (or summary) to see if the article is of interest. And, check out the authors' affiliations to discover whether they are credible.
Here are a couple of tip sheets on using advanced features within Webster University Libraries' databases, which include:
