Origin Stories: Initiations, Identities, and Indigenous Imaginations (HC): Journal Articles

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

• Expertise - What is the author's training?  Has he or she published other material in this subject area?

• Audience - Who are the intended readers?  Is it for the general public or for college students and researchers?

• Discipline Focus - What subject approach does the author take?  Historical, religious, literary?  If literary, is there a special interest in a particular kind of interpretation, such as linguistic, psychoanalytic or gendered?

• Documentation - Is there a bibliography for further reading?  Are there titles there that are new to you?

• Date - If the article was published more than 10 years ago, can you find a more recent point-of-view?

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.

Journal Databases Covering All Subject Areas

Subject-Specific Journal Databases

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.

Diego Rivera, La Malinche, Mexico City, Palacio Nacional  (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

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 
          politic*  will get politics, political, politicians

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

AND: Combine topics that you want to see together
           nepal* AND philadelphia AND refugee*

" " Phrase: Use quotation marks to search for words together in that order
          "reading terminal"   "philadelphia refugee health collaborative"

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 for additional ideas and concepts. Then change your search terms for additional results