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WRPR 173: Transnational Crossings (HC): Journal Articles

Writing Program 173: Transnational Crossings: Representations of the Berlin Wall in American Culture (Farber) Fall 2015

Introduction

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?

Using Journal Articles

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

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

AND: Combine topics that you want to see together
           japan* AND popular AND culture

" " Phrase: Use quotation marks to search for words together in that order
          "united states"   "supply chain"

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

West Berliners Help East Berliners Climb over the Wall, Nov. 10, 1989

  Berlin Wall: 20th Anniversary Of The Fall  (Source: Business Insider Australia)

Journal Indexes

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.