HIST 125: Latin American and LatinX History (HC)

Young Lords party poster, circa 1971 (Source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 1.0 )  See more resources

The resources here will provide you with scholarly articles for your essay.  When you select and read articles, be aware of the following issues:

• Peer Review - Articles submitted to scholarly journals are reviewed by researchers in the field  for significance and accuracy. Authors receive critiques of their work and have the opportunity to improve them before publication. This is in contrast to magazine articles and much content on the Web that generally receives only copy editing at most.

• Scholarly Dialog - Researchers build on and react to the work of others in their field.  Who does your author quote? Is she or he in agreement or opposed to previous ideas?  What does your author want to add to the argument around the issues? 

• Succinct argument - People compete to have their articles published in scholarly journals.  Space is at a premium, so authors need well-argued interpretations that convey their ideas clearly and briefly.

Journal articles provide in-depth scholarly information for your research.  They are vetted and improved by peer review prior to publication.  They form an important part of the communication network that makes research available, prompts discussion, and identifies new issues to resolve.

When searching in journal databases, these strategies will get better results:

*  Truncation:  Shorten search words with an asterisk to get all the forms 
          war*  will get war/s, warrior/s, warlike, etc.

OR:  Link synonyms with OR and group them with parentheses
          (immigra* OR international*)

AND: Combine topics that you want to see together
          guatemala* AND women AND indigen*

" " Phrase: Use quotation marks to search for words together in that order
          "human rights"   "environmental history"

Focus: Choose where the database is searching.  It may be set automatically for keyword.  You can make the search more precise by looking instead for title words only or for subjects.

Results: Look at the articles retrieved and change search terms for additional results

The databases below allow you to search for journal articles by subject. Use the filters to focus your search results by such categories as type of publication (scholarly versus popular) or by publications years.

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.

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.