Save time by using * to search for variations on a word
Example: athlet* finds athlete, athletes, athletic, athletics, athleticism, etc.
Use quotation marks to keep separate words together as one concept
Example: search for the concept of "mental health" rather than the words "mental" and "health" separately
Connect your keywords and concepts using AND and OR. This is called Boolean searching.
Example: hockey AND (fighting OR aggression)
This 2:42 minute video shows how to improve your search with AND/OR/NOT
What is peer-review?
Search across multiple journal collections all in once place. Use filters and the advanced search to narrow your search to peer reviewed articles from sociological journals.
You can also search inside specific article databases to find peer reviewed articles. Here are some good databases for sociological topics:
For this assignment, you need to find sociological research articles. While some journals are explicitly sociological, many are interdisciplinary in nature, publishing articles from a range of disciplines that may include (but not exclusively focus on) sociology. If you find an article and are unsure if it adopts a sociological perspective, you can try the following:
The best way to find journal articles on a topic is to search in a database that contains sociological journals, but you can also go directly to a journal to find articles. If you want to browse sociological journals or journals (or journals that publish sociological research articles), try the following publications (most of which are included in the databases listed above):