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.
A full-text weekly magazine which, each week, devotes its entire issue to a discussion of a contemporary public policy topic or news event. Each 24-page issue presents background, chronology, an essay, opposing viewpoints and a bibliography.
JSTOR is a digital archive of fully searchable back issues of scholarly journals in anthropology, Asian studies, Afro American studies, ecology, economics, education, finance, general science, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, political science, sociology, and statistics. It also includes over 2 million rights-cleared images (fka ARTstor) from major collections around the world, discoverable alongside JSTOR’s electronic texts on one feature-rich platform. Learn more about the transition to JSTOR.
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: Religious beliefs and marriage
Write your topic as a sentence
Can people of different religious beliefs have happy marriages?
Before you search your topic think of key words
People |
Different |
Religious Beliefs |
Happy |
Marriage |
persons |
varied |
religions |
successful |
union |
folks |
divergent |
faiths |
thriving |
matrimony |
couples |
|
|
bliss
|
intermarriage |
It's tempting to just plug your search topic (Can people of different religious beliefs have happy marriages?) 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 to write your search string:
(people or couples) and different and (religion or faith ) and (happy or successful) and (intermarriage or marriage or union)