Research Guides: HIST 270: From Empire to Nation: The Ottoman World Transformed (HC): Journal Articles

Finding Journal Articles

Journal articles provide in depth scholarly information. They are vetted and improved by peer review. They are usually fairly short in length and focused on discussing one specific issue. The following indexes are good places to find journal articles about history.

Use the Find It button in these indexes to find out if the journal articles are available in the Tri-College libraries. If the journal is not listed in Tripod, use the Find It request form or the Interlibrary Loan Request Form on Tripod to have a copy of the article sent to you from another library.

Discipline-Specific Indexes

These indexes are particularly good for accessing the scholarly literature of specific disciplines, i.e., articles written by historians, Asian studies scholars, and literary scholars.

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.
Index Islamicus
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Offers citations to literature on Islam, the Middle East and Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, and Muslim minorities elsewhere. Includes citations to journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and book reviews from 1906 to present.
Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) Index
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Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, government documents, statistical compilations, committee reports, intergovernmental, and private organizations reports. Areas covered include political, economic, social and public policy issues. Covers 1915-present.
RAMBI: Index of Articles on Jewish Studies This link opens in a new window
Offers citations to articles in the field of Jewish Studies and in the study of Eretz Israel. Material comes mainly from the holdings of the Jewish National and University Library. Covers 1966-present.
JSTOR
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Provides full-text and page images from many of the top journals in most academic disciplines. Coverage is from the inception of the journal through three to five years ago.
ProQuest Research Library
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Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-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.

Web of Science Citation Databases
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When you connect, open the Basic Search tab to find the Cited Reference Search link to begin.
Enter the author's name: Last name first First name initial only with asterisk
Skip Cited Title box
Put the publication year in the Cited Year box
Under Current Limits, open Citation Databases and uncheck Science Citation Index and Conference Proceedings Science.
On the next screen choose the relevant results based on the Cited Work titles.
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.
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 is limited to journal articles only.