Research Guides: HIST 317: Religion, Power and Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean (HC): Journal Articles

Finding Journal Articles

Journal articles and other periodical publications will provide scholarly information for you on specific aspects of Latin American and global history. Articles are peer-reviewed prior to publication, so that authors can improve their arguments. Also since articles are generally published on a shorter schedule than books, they can be more-up-to-date. The following indexes are the best ways for you to identify journal articles related to your research.

Use the buttons in the indexes to locate articles available in the three colleges. For those not owned locally, take the ILL (interlibrary loan article delivery) option.

Historical Abstracts
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Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, book reviews and dissertations that cover world history from 1450 to the present (excluding the U.S. and Canada which are covered in "America: History and Life"). Includes publications from 1953-present.
Swarthmore has access to the full text.
Publicaciones y Revistas Sociales y Humanísticas (PRISMA)
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Covers all aspects of Hispanic studies, from research on indigenous cultures past and present to current politics and society, Disciplines covered include anthropology, economics, history, literature, political science and sociology. Includes works in English and Spanish.

DialNet
This is a virtual library of Ibero-American scholarship, hosted by the University de la Rioja in Spain. It indexes more than 11,000 journals and 8+ million documents. There are a growing number of full text articles available as content is continuously updated. All subjects covered including the social sciences.

Art Full Text
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Offers abstracts of journals, museum bulletins and yearbooks in the fields of art, architecture, decorative arts and photography. Covers abstracts from 1929-present, full-text articles 1997-present.
International Bibliography of Art
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Provides coverage of scholarship on European art from late antiquity to the present and art from the Americas from the colonial era to the present. Note that this database began in 2008. For coverage of earlier years see the Bibliography of the History of Art.
ATLA Religion Database + ATLA Serials (American Theological Library Association)
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Provides online access to the entire core collection of more than fifty significant scholarly journals in the field of religion. Also provides citation information for journal articles, book reviews and essays for over 600 journals in the fields of religion and theology. Covers 1949-present.
MLA International Bibliography
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Database of scholarly books and articles related to literature, language, linguistics, film, theater and folklore. Includes scholarship from 1926 to the present.

Tracking Citations Forward in Time

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.

Web of Science
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When you connect, choose the Cited References option to begin.
Enter the author's name: Last name first, First name initial only with asterisk (e.g., Smith J*)
Skip Cited Work box
Put the publication year in the Cited Year(s) box
On the next screen, sort the results by Cited Work, choose the relevant results and hit "See Results."
The results screen shows the newest articles first. Most records include a summary of contents, so that you can determine how relevant they may be for your research.
Use the search box and filters on the left to refine your results. See the variety of ways in which you can sort results and add a further keyword. Note also the References link on the far right. It gives you an immediate view of the bibliographies from the Cited References you have just found.

Google Scholar
To search for cited references in Google Scholar, enter the title of the article or book in quotation marks.
In the results list, check the link Cited by [number] for material citing the title you have entered.
Bonus Google Scholar includes books in its results. Web of Science results are limited to journal articles only.