How does the author summarize previous scholarship on the questions involved? Thinking about this will add to your understanding of the broader context.
What disciplinary approach/es does the author take? For example, is the article written from the point of view of political science or media studies? Are there interpretations from additional academic fields, like psychology or sociology, introduced within an article that explores a 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?
The databases below allow you to search for journal articles by subject. When you find a title of interest, if the full text is not immediately available (as in JSTOR and Proquest), use the Find It button to check for Haverford's holdings.
See the Search Tips tab for examples of ways to develop terminology and construct search statements.
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.