HIST 347: The Art of Governance in High Qing China (HC)

Golden pheasant rank badge, 2nd rank civil servant, silk tapestry with painted details, China, Qing Dynasty, late 18th – early 19th century, 

Denver Art Museum (Wikimedia Commons, public domain) See museum notes on a Mandarin duck badge

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.

Use the Find It button in these indexes to find out if the journal articles are available in the Tri-College libraries. If the journal is not listed in Tripod, use the Find It request form or the Interlibrary Loan Request Form on Tripod to have a copy of the article sent to you from another library.

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 other researchers.

General Indexes Covering All Subject Areas

Usually researchers find more sources by looking at the footnotes in an article or book, but these will always be older than the publication you have in hand.  
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.