Finding Articles

Articles are generally stored in databases, which are a sort of a repository for information and a search tool all in one. All of our databases can be found in the Database Finder on the library website.

By default, the databases are listed in alphabetical order. That’s great when you know exactly what you want, but the library has a lot of databases, and you might need to narrow things down. The menu in the upper left that says All Subjects will let you choose a subject area and see only databases that are in that subject area. There’s also a list of Popular Databases on the right side, as you scroll down. I suggest starting with one of these: Academic Search Complete.

Enter your search terms, and click Search. In the results screen, like on Amazon and other sites, you have a number of options down the left side you can use to refine your results. You can choose only scholarly peer-reviewed articles, and there are other types in this database, so if you’re specifically looking for scholarly journal articles, that’s a good idea. You can also use the slider to limit to a certain date range, like if you don’t want older articles.

After you search, take a moment to carefully examine your results. Are you mostly getting the kinds of articles you’re looking for, or not? The exact wording you use for the concepts in your search can be very important, and your results can help you figure out the right words to use. If you’ve found articles that seem really useful, what kinds of words are used in the title and abstract to describe the topics? Would it help to add those to your search? If you’ve found articles that aren’t useful, what words in your search seem to be leading you to those? Could you remove or change them?

When you have an article that you want to keep, look for a link below it that says PDF Full Text, or sometimes HTML Full Text or Linked Full Text. Clicking on that will get you to the full article, which you can then read, save, print, or do anything else with that you need. Sometimes, though, you won’t see a “full text” option. Instead, you’ll see this button with a Rowan torch and “Get it!” written very small on it. That means we don’t have the full article in this database, but we might have it somewhere else. Click the button, and it’ll automatically check across all of our online articles for you. In this case, we really don’t subscribe to this journal at all, so we don’t have access. If we did, just like with e-books, you’d see a “View Online” section on this screen with links to where you could find the article. Instead, what you see here is a link to order the article through Interlibrary Loan. Interlibrary Loan is a service the library offers, where if we don’t own something, we can get a copy for you for free from another library. Just click that link, log in with your Rowan NetID username and password, and you’ll be taken to an order form for the article that’s already filled out. You just have to make sure it’s correct and click Submit. Within a few days, you’ll get an email telling you that the article has arrived, and you can go to Interlibrary Loan on the library website, choose ILLiad, and log back into this system to retrieve it. It’ll be available for you to download under this section in the left-hand menu, that says Electronically Received Articles.