Tutorial

Check with your professor to determine which citation style is required for your research. For the Paideia research paper, you will use either the MLA (Modern Language Association) style or the CMS (Chicago Manual of Style) style for your citations. Make sure you double-check to find out which style you need to use.

Evaluating material from the World Wide Web is as important as evaluating every book that you use during the research process. By establishing evaluative criteria for online resources, you begin to determine if you can draw any conclusions about the reliability and accuracy of the information you have found.

Consult with your instructor or the librarians if you have questions about identifying appropriate primary sources for your research paper topic.

If you find a citation for an article, and wonder if it is available in print and/or electronic form from Preus Library, search Magnus for the title of the journal (not the title of the article), by doing a Journal Title search.

Imagine you wanted to find this article:

America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts are two separate databases, however they have a similar appearance and features set as Academic Search Complete.

America: History and Life indexes articles related to United States and Canadian history from prehistory to the present; Historical Abstracts indexes articles related to world history from 1450 to the present.

Project MUSE is a digital archive containing full-text coverage of the most recent one to seven years of approximately 300 scholarly journals. Major subjects covered are the arts, humanities, history, literature, social sciences, and science.

JSTOR is a digital archives of the leading scholarly journals across all subject areas and disciplines. Full-text images are available for journals beginning with the first published issue and ending between 1998 and 2002. Issues published in the past 3-5 years are usually not available in JSTOR. This collection provides the unique opportunity to track how scholarly thought on a topic develops over time. The content of JSTOR is indexed in Google Scholar, allowing you the choice of search interfaces when searching on-campus.

Academic Search Complete is a scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database containing full-text for nearly 9,800 publications, including more than 4,500 peer-reviewed publications. In addition, this database offers indexing and abstracts for over 9,000 journals.

Preus Library has access to approximately 50 databases and indexes that identify and provide access to articles. Most of these are searchable through the Internet.

Many of the databases and indexes we provide are subject-specific, and you may find plenty of use for them as you continue on in your studies. The broad-based databases listed below are good starting points for scholarly article searches for many topics. Click on the links to learn the features of each database.

h3.