RELS-255: Research & Writing in Religious Studies

When you are looking for a specific journal article

In the course of your research you will undoubtedly come across articles you want to locate through the reference lists in a course textbook, encyclopedias and other readings you may have done. A reference to an article has two titles: (1) title of the article, and (2) title of the periodical (journal, magazine or newspaper) in which the article is published.

When you have a citation to an article you want to locate there are a variety of options for locating it.

1. You can search Omni by placing quotation marks around the title of the article and adding in the author's name and title of the periodical if necessary.  If you don't find the article in Omni, try step 2.
2. You can search Omni for the title of the journal/magazine/newspaper in which the article appears (but not for the title or author of the article) by performing a Journal Title search.

Tips for Finding Journals at Queen's Library

• Journals can be found online in full text (which is increasingly the case), on microfilm, or in print.
• If the journal is available in print, note the holdings (the date range the Library holds) and the call number. At Stauffer Library journals are located on the 2nd floor.
• If the Library has a subscription to an online edition, note the dates of coverage. In many cases, there is more than one database that contains the full text of the journal, but seldom is there overlap with the date of coverage. To access the online edition, click on the appropriate link.

Often when you are doing research you don't have an article or book title in mind but, rather, you have a topic. The best resources to use for locating articles on a topic are the Library's indexes and article databases.

As these research tools have a common purpose (to allow you to locate articles) the two terms are often used interchangeably.

The Library subscribes to hundreds of online article indexes and databases (over 650 databases at last count) on a wide range of subjects. The content varies from database to database - many contain full text articles, others contain videos, images and music. For most databases, publisher licensing agreements with Queen's University restrict access to members of the Queen's community.

ATLA

The ATLA Religion Database® (ATLA RDB®) is the premier index to journal articles, book reviews, and collections of essays in all fields of religion, with coverage from 1949 and retrospective indexing for some journal issues as far back as the nineteenth century. Journals are selected for inclusion according to their scholarly merit and scope.

A handy suite of brief tutorials demonstrate how to use ATLA database search features and search content.Tutorials include:

(1) Maximizing Your Search: Using Boolean AND Connectors, Truncating Search Terms and Other Advanced Search Topics

(2) Three Methods to Search for Biblical Scripture Citations

Another important point about subscription Library databases is that they contain content/information (citations or full text articles, for example) that is not freely available through other search tools such as web search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo. Subscription databases also provide a variety of search options including the ability to limit to scholarly journal content and full text. Frequently discipline specific databases also provide a thesaurus, which enables the searcher to locate citations based on a controlled vocabulary (which is much more specific than a keyword search). As such, these types of library subscription databases are your primary gateway to the scholarly literature in your field.

From the Library Homepage there are several ways to find an article index or database that covers the literature of your discipline.  The Library Research LibGuide for Religious Studies provides a list of recommended article databases. When you know what type of information you are looking for (articles, books, websites, etc.) the Research Guide is an excellent starting point. 

Multidisciplinary databases cover a range of subject areas.  If your topic does not fall neatly into one subject area, or if you would like different perspectives on your topic, these general databases can be a good place to start your research. The library has produced a list of Multidisciplinary Databases in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The fastest way to access a database when you know the title of it is to click on the Databases link on the library homepage directly below the Omni search box. One multidisciplinary databases that is often useful to students conducting research in the religious studies domain is Academic Search Complete.

Academic Search Complete

As mentioned earlier, if you know the name of the database you wish to search, you can enter it from the Databases link.

Academic Search Complete is a multi-disciplinary index (with abstracts) to more than 10,900 publications including peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, monographs and reports. Approximately 50% of the journal titles also contain the full-text of articles. If the full text of the article is not available in the database itself, click the "Get it at Queen's" icon to search for the article's availability through Queen's Library subscriptions.

Although it is on a different platform from CBCA, the search principles remain the same. Related topic words are entered in each search box, separated by default with the Boolean operator AND. Using the dropdown arrows, you can switch the default AND to OR or NOT. AND is usually the preferred setting: