Finding Books and Articles
Basic Search Tips
- Place quotation marks around keyword phrases
"Civil War"
- Capitalize Boolean logic connectors (AND, OR).
narrative OR plot
"American Involvement" AND World War I
- Click either "View all formats and languages" or "View all editions" to view all library holdings for a particular title.
- If we do not have a book or article, you can request it from another university through InterLibrary Loan.
- America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
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Index of scholarly literature covering the history and culture of the U.S. and Canada, from prehistory to the present.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text of core journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences
- Delaware HistoryCreated by the Delaware Historical Society
- Academic OneFile This link opens in a new window
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A premier source for peer-reviewed, full-text articles from scholarly journals and other authoritative sources. Also includes thousands of podcasts and transcripts from NPR and CNN, as well as videos from BBC Worldwide Learning. (Coverage: 1980 --)
- GenderWatch This link opens in a new window
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Full-text collection of international journals, magazines, newsletters, regional publications, special reports and conference proceedings devoted to womens and gender issues. (Coverage: mid-1970s --)
- GreenFILE This link opens in a new window
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Covers all aspects of human impact to the environment, including content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text of core journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences
- PAIS Index This link opens in a new window
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Covers public policy issues and emphasizes factual and statistical information. Print and electronic journals in the social sciences are indexed with particular attention to articles that bear on public policy, administration and legislation. Business topics are covered, with emphasis on economic factors, industry surveys, business-societal interactions and similar issues, rather than details of business operations. (Coverage: 1915 --)
- Project MUSE Journals This link opens in a new window
Full-text, scholarly, electronic journals in the arts, humanities and social sciences from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. (Coverage: 1993 or later to the present)
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
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Indexes the international literature of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. (Coverage: 1952 --)
- Women's Studies International This link opens in a new window
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Bibliographic database for womens studies and feminist research. A valuable resource for many disciplines, including sociology, history, international relations, humanities.
Tips & Tricks for Searching for Articles
Finding articles within databases and journals is not the same process you would use to conduct a search in Google or an internet search engine. You cannot type in a question, but rather need to choose specific keywords and phrases to find results. These tips are similar to how you would search for material in DELCAT.
Helpful Ways to Search:
- Use quotations around a phrase to "tell" the database or journal that you want these words to remain together.
- Ex: "American exceptionalism"
- Think of synonyms to your keywords...Especially when conducting historical research, you may need to develop words and phrases that were used during that particular time period, rather than modern-day words.
- Ex: World War I; First World War; The Great War - All would give you different results!
- Use AND/OR to connect words, concepts, and phrases together to receive specified results.
- Ex: World War I AND United States
Use the Advanced Search option in databases and journals to narrow down by date, region, type of document, and more!