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SOCY 122: Introduction to Academic Library Research

Course guide library research tutorial

Finding Articles

In Module 5, Finding Books, we looked at searching Omni to find books by title, author, and topic keywords. In this module, we turn to finding articles - specifically scholarly journal articles. 

Omni includes content from the various research databases to which Queen's University Library subscribes, but not everything indexed in those databases is included. Due to its vast database, searches in Omni will retrieve search results often in the thousands, if not more, but many of the search results may not be in your subject discipline. Omni is a great research tool for locating several articles to get started, but if you are conducting a thorough, discipline-specific search or are finding it difficult to narrow your results to sociological sources, the best option is to identify relevant databases such as those listed on the library subject guides and use then use the advanced search options within those databases. 

In this module we will address: 

  • the characteristics of different types of articles (scholarly, popular and newspaper)
  • parts of an academic journal article
  • how to locate a specific article when you have a citation
  • how to find relevant databases 
  • how to find articles on a topic using Sociological Abstracts
  • recommended multidisciplinary search tools