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Databases
Articles provide very targeted information, usually focusing on one small segment of a broader topic. Articles also tend to be more recent. Newspaper and magazine articles can be updated within days or weeks of an event, while academic journal articles may take a few months or longer.
Library databases are the best place to locate articles. These databases contain thousands of sources for you to search for free full-text. Databases have different types of sources, mostly journal or magazine articles, but some databases provide multimedia such as videos or images.
This page provides suggestions for the databases and other resources you can use to find articles on your topic. You will log in with your Office 365 account if prompted.
Identify Keywords
Many times you will have a research question or thesis statement as you begin to research. When using library resources, it's usually best to pick out the main concepts of your topic and search by using these (referred to as keywords), instead of a sentence or question. Consider which parts of your topic are essential, and use those.
When looking for keywords, focus on nouns and noun phrases; these are more effective search terms. You may need to change a term to a noun for best results. Ignore verbs and words like influenced, affected, etc.
Keywords and search terms good for your subject:
- Carbon sequestration (for carbon capture and storage)
- Afforestation
- Biochar
- Seawater fertilization (add carbon as a keyword)
- Biomass burning
- weathering (add carbon as a keyword)
To keep phrases (two or more words) together, place them in quotation marks: "Carbon sequestration"
Library Databases
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowA full-text database covering many different disciplines and subject areas. A great place to start research on any topic.
Tutorial This link opens in a new window | How to Cite This link opens in a new window - Credo Reference This link opens in a new windowAn online library of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and reference books that are easily searchable by topic. Credo Reference is an excellent starting place for students doing background research on their topic.
Tutorial This link opens in a new window | How to Cite This link opens in a new window - Applied Science & Technology Source This link opens in a new windowOffers full-text and indexed content that covers the entirety of the applied sciences and computing disciplines, including acoustics, aeronautics, neural networks, nuclear engineering, and more. Includes leading trade journals, professional and technical society journals, and conference proceedings.
Tutorial This link opens in a new window | How to Cite This link opens in a new window - GreenFILE This link opens in a new windowOffers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more.
Tutorial This link opens in a new window | How to Cite This link opens in a new window - JSTOR This link opens in a new windowProvides access to full-text, academic journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, including African-American studies, anthropology, education, mathematics, history, and more. Also includes an image search This link opens in a new window.
Tutorial This link opens in a new window | How to Cite This link opens in a new window - ScienceDirect This link opens in a new windowProvides access to the Health and Life Sciences - College Edition collection from Elsevier, including over 1,000 academic journals. Note: only articles with the following icon are available in full text to Santa Fe students:
Tutorial This link opens in a new window | How to Cite This link opens in a new window
Search Tips
Phrase Searching
Place a common phrase in "quotation marks" to keep the phrase together.
Multi-Database Searching
Click Choose Databases in Academic Search Complete to add on Applied Science & Technology Source and GreenFILE, in order to search all three databases together.
Limit to Trade Publications
Trade publications are geared at those working in an industry and report on news and developments in the field. Click the Trade Publications link under Source Types in the search results (note: you will not see this if the Peer Reviewed box was checked).
Trade publications can help you learn about new and emerging technologies and understand concepts from within an industry.
How to Read a Journal Article
Reading and understanding an academic journal article can be daunting and is often more difficult than reading other types of information. Fortunately, most scientific journal articles have the same sections, and you can look at certain sections to pick out the main ideas and key findings.
This process guides you through a quick method to understand the key points of a journal article. Click through the tabs to see each step.
Please keep in mind that the sections mentioned correspond to scientific journal articles, which present original research. Some articles, especially those written in other fields (like the humanities or law), may not use these specific section headings.
First, look at the title of the article to start to determine what the article will be about.
Now, read the abstract and see if you can identify the following:
- The main problem or question the article addresses
- The author’s approach (how they did the work to enable them to write the article)
- The author’s conclusions
- Why people should care about the work
At this point, you may decide that an article is not relevant to your research, and that's okay! It's important to get a feel for what an article is investigating and how it can be relevant to your own research.
Now, read the introduction. The introduction serves the same function as the abstract but with more details. Don’t breeze through the introduction in order to get to the "meat" of the text. In fact, do the opposite! Take time to understand the introduction because it could summarize the whole piece, present the main idea, tell us why we should care, and may even offer a road map for the rest of the article. Sometimes the introduction is obviously labeled "Introduction," but sometimes it's not. See if you can find it!
This might seem counter-intuitive, but now you can skip toward the end of the paper and look at the discussion section and the conclusion. The discussion section will usually put the results in context—what does it mean? What can we start to determine? What patterns are there? The final conclusion, then, is the final summary of what was learned from the study. Even though that information was included in the abstract, even a slight re-phrasing can help you understand the author’s arguments in an important, new way. Note: some articles may not have a separate conclusion section.
Now, you may choose to review other sections of the article to fill in your understanding. Other sections of a journal article that you can go back to are the literature review, which is a summary of the research that has already been done (and is sometimes included within the introduction), and the methods section, which lays out the exact experiment or model used. Many times, the results section may be raw data, so this may or may not be useful.
If there are any limitations or further study sections, you should examine them carefully. Limitations will note if there were any issues that may mean the current study cannot be broadly applied. For instance, maybe the people who were included in the study were mostly men, so it's hard to determine if the conclusions are equally as applicable to women. The Further Study section will discuss areas for further research, or questions that arose that may need to be investigated.
Now that you have a general understanding of the text’s different parts and of the main argument, think about what relevance the article has to your own purpose. How might you use ideas from the text to "enter the conversation" about the topic or questions at hand? How does this article help support or advance your argument? You may also choose to look through the article's references to find more research on the same topic.
