HIST 001M: History of Food (SC)

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Scholarly databases (e.g. JSTOR) are tools for finding scholarly journal articles. It's essential to use these tools when doing research for papers, or else you risk missing important scholarly articles that relate to your topic. Scholarly databases will give you a smaller number of search results than a Google search, and it's easy to limit your results to peer-reviewed scholarly articles.

That said, scholarly databases don't work the same way as Google and other search engines. When you search for articles in America, History and Life, you're only searching the abstract (summary) of the article. You don't search the full text of the article. So you need to be clever in choosing search terms and using the Advanced Search tools to actually find what you're looking for.

Help is available - Simon Elichko, the librarian for this course, can help you come up with search terms and strategies. Contact them at selichk1@swarthmore.edu to make an appointment or ask a question. Or visit their office hours at the McCabe Research & Info Desk.
 

If you can't find scholarly articles that discuss the topic you're interested in, you can try these other resources to expand your options. Don't hesitate to contact Simon Elichko (librarian for this course) at selichk1@swarthmore.edu for help with choosing search terms and getting databases to work well.