The army and the people cooperate to defend South China, 1937 (IISH/Stefan Landsberger Collection)
Selecting Journal Articles
Where was the article published? Does it come from a scholarly journal published by a university press or one that is connected to an organization of researchers?
What is the author's main argument? See the accompanying abstract or skim the first page or two of the article.
What are the author's qualifications? Look at the brief biographical sketch accompanying the article or check the web. What other articles and books has the author published?
When was the article published? Are there more recent articles that may incorporate newer evidence and interpretations?
Reading Journal Articles Critically
How does the author summarize previous scholarship on the questions involved? Thinking about this will add to your understanding of the broader historical context.
What disciplinary approach/es does the author take? For example, is the article written from the point of view of history or political science? Are there interpretations from additional academic fields, like anthropology or sociology, introduced within an article that explores an historical or political question?
What makes this author's argument significant? What new ideas does this article offer?
What kinds of primary sources does the author use? What evidence does the author offer to support the argument and how does the author interpret that evidence?
What are the author's conclusions? What concluding ideas does the author draw from his or her argument? Do you find it convincing? Are there questions that were not fully answered?
Journal articles provide in depth scholarly information. They are vetted and improved by peer review. They are usually fairly short in length and focused on discussing one specific issue. The following indexes are good places to find journal articles about history. See the Search Tips tab for examples of ways to develop terminology and construct search statements.
When searching for a topic of interest ("great leap forward" OR "long march"), look for articles from the recommended journals in the two boxes immediately below. In most cases you have full access to all issues of these key journals
When you find an article of interest, if the full text is not immediately available, use the Find It button 
to check for Haverford or Bryn Mawr holdings.
When selecting articles and analyzing them critically, see the prompts below in the box, Using Journal Articles Critically.
Discipline-Specific Indexes
These indexes are particularly good for accessing the scholarly literature of specific disciplines, i.e., articles written by historians, Asian studies scholars, and art historians.
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Citation indexes like the Web of Science (which includes sections for the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Science) are set up to search for sources cited in the footnotes of journal articles as soon as they become available.
This allows you to find newer articles which cite the books and articles you already know are key for your topic. By relying on connections between authors rather than subject words and by moving forward in time, citation searching can open up new avenues of research.
See this tutorial for more information on cited reference searching.
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