LibGuides Global Boxes: Articles

Search an article database to find citations (title, author, title of journal, date, page numbers) for articles on a particular topic.  The Library gives you access to over 200 article databases covering different disciplines.

1. Think about which academic disciplines might write about your topic.  Examples:  literature, film, anthropology, history...
2. From the Library home page, click on "Find + borrow", select "Collections" from the dropdown menu, and choose the "Use Berkeley's electronic databases" box.
3. Select the appropriate academic disciplines and then look for "Recommended" databases.

Google Scholar is an easy way to do interdisciplinary research, and with some settings changes can become even more useful.  You need a Google account to use these features.

• Set up a Google Scholar Alert to be automatically notified when new articles are added to Google on topics of interest: 

Do your search in Google Scholar. Look in the left sidebar for the Create Alert link next to the envelope icon, and click it.  New items will be sent to your email account as they are found by Google.

• Make Google display links to full text of articles that Berkeley subscribes to:

Open Scholar. Click on the menu icon in the upper left corner and then the gear iconto reach the settings page. On the next screen, choose Library Links from the left-hand menu. In the search box, type the word Berkeley.  Choose University of California, Berkeley - Get it at UC, and Open Worldcat Search.

• Ever wanted to trace an article’s impact? Google now permits searching within citing articles.

Do a Google Scholar search. Click on the "Cited by" link under a citation and select the "Search within articles citing..." checkbox.

Created by Bielefeld University Library, BASE is an excellent resource for finding academic web resources. The search tool provides more than 300 million documents from more than 11,000 content providers. About 60% of the content is freely available (Open Access). 

Unlike Google Scholar, BASE allows you to search just the metadata of documents, not the full text of the resources indexed. 

The Basic search provides a single search field and will search all of metadata by default. On the search results page, there are facets that allow you to limit your search results (for example, subject, language, year of publication). 

The Advance search allows you to specify which metadata fields you want to search (for example, author, title, doi) and to limit your search to different types of documents, publication year, and other facets.

Search Help provides guidance on how to construct a search. Like many of other search engines, a search for more than one term automatically retreieves results containting all the terms. Quotation marks can be used for phrase searching. But other search syntax is availalble to help you construct more sophisticated searches.

Plural, genitive and other word forms will be searched automatically. To disable this feature, choose "Verbatim search" in the advanced search or in the search field on the results page.

If you choose the option "Multi-lingual search" in the advanced search or in the search field on the results page you can also search for synonyms and translations, provided that the search term is included in Eurovoc Thesaurus or Agrovoc Thesaurus.

Here's a citation for an article...how do you find the whole article?

Gaultney, J. F. (2010). The Prevalence of Sleep Disorders in College Students: Impact on Academic Performance. Journal of American College Health, 59(2), 91-97. 

This citation is for an article by J. F. Gaultney, published in 2010 in the Journal of American College Health, a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal. It's part of volume 59, issue 2 of this journal, and was printed on pages 91-97. There are several ways of determining if the article you're looking for is available at Berkeley, in electronic or printed format:

Use UC Library Search's Journal Search tool to look up the journal title in UC Library Search. Search the title of the journal (NOT the article title!).  It will tell you:

• if we subscribe to the journal you're looking for
• which years we have
• whether our subscription is print ("hard-copy") or online
• what the call number is (for print journals)
• where to find the journal online (for online journals)
• what's the latest print issue we've received

Still having problems finding your article? Ask a librarian!

Once you've searched an index to find articles, you may need to use Get it at UC  to link to a PDF or html file if the full text is not immediately available. Each database is a bit different, but a good rule of thumb is:

• When you see either icon, click on it to view your article access options (ex: full text, call number, Interlibrary Loan request, etc.)

Suppose you want to keep current with a specific journal that you don't have a personal subscription to.  You can do it with a RSS feed from the journal.  Let's take the US Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook.

First, subscribe to an RSS feed reader.  Google has a free one called Google Reader [there are many others].

Then, use the feed reader function to 'add a subscription'  to the journal you want to see updates for.  Or, if the journal has its own RSS feed this icon will appear in the URL box.  Just click it to set up your journal alert.

ticTOCS | The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling you to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers.

Sometimes you want alerts for new articles on a particular set of search parameters.  Web of Science databases can create these alerts for you. [video tutorial]