Guides: Anthropology Research Guide: Finding Journals and Scholarly Articles

Librarian

Subjects: Education, Social Sciences, Social Work

Planning your research

Choosing a Research Topic:

Find a research topic. Your teacher may assign you a topic or you can browse through Encyclopedias, your text book or popular magazines for ideas. If you're still stumped ask your teacher for some ideas.

Limit your topic so your research is manageable

Topic: Cultural festivals and rituals

Ways to limit your topic:

Research a specific culture's festivals or rituals
How rituals (such as birthday parties or weddings) are celebrated in different cultures

Write your topic as a sentence

I would like to compare wedding customs between Christians and Muslims

Before you search your topic think of key words

Compare	Wedding	Customs	Christian	Muslim
contrast	marriage	ceremony	Catholic	Islamic
evaluate	nuptials	ritual	Baptist	Sunni
examine		tradition

Boolean Logic
It's tempting to just plug your search topic (I would like to compare wedding customs between Christians and Muslims) into Google or article databases and see what comes up. But you get a much more accurate search by coming up with a search strategy. You don't have to use ALL the key words you come up with.

First apply Boolean Logic:

What broadens your search, what narrows it?

Using Boolean Operators write your search string:

(compare or contrast) and (marriage or weddings) and (customs or traditions) and (Christian or Catholic) and (Muslim or Islamic)

Best Online databases for Anthropology

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Complete, first stop for the beginning researcher, is our largest multi-disciplinary database, offering thousands of full-text journals, as well as indexing and abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings. Most of the periodicals are covered back to at least the early 1990s, but some content dates back as far as 1887. The database features some content going back as far as 1867, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. To cross-search additional subject-specific databases from this publisher, click on Choose Databases.
America: History & Life This link opens in a new window
America: History and Life provides indexing (points to) journal articles, dissertations, book and media reviews about United States and Canada history from prehistory to the present. AHL has an excellent thesaurus (subject terms) and includes many links to the full text of articles.
Anthropology Plus This link opens in a new window
Anthropology Plus provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. The index offers coverage of core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals.
AnthroSource This link opens in a new window
An online portal to full text anthropological resources. Offers access to AAA journals, newsletters, bulletins, and monographs. Contains past, present, and future AAA periodicals other key anthropological resources, including text, sound, and video; and interactive services to foster communities of interest and practice throughout the discipline.
Historical Abstracts (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Historical Abstracts provides indexing (points to) journal articles and dissertations dealing with the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada). Historical Abstracts has an excellent thesaurus (subject terms) and includes many links to the full text of articles.