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PSC/CJ 330 - Judicial Process: Journal Articles and Databases

This guide is created to support PSC/CJ 330.

What are Scholarly Articles and Where do I Find Them?

A database is a collection of many different academic journals that can all be searched at once. Most academic journals use a peer-review process to review articles for quality before publication.

You search a database by creating a search query. Search queries use search terms and can have Boolean Operators and punctuation. Based off your search query, you will get a list of articles (and other resources) as results.

You can also search for articles in Google Scholar.

Tricks for Choosing Search Terms

Using Your Research Question

Turn your research question into search terms.

  1. Write out your research question. How do short-term employment contracts affect hospital healthcare workers' mental well-being?
  2. Identify the important words or terms. Look at the nouns that specify the scope of your topic. 
    1. What people? Contract healthcare workers
    2. Where? Hospitals
    3. What kind of issue? Mental health
  3. Write out each important word/term. List synonyms or terms that have the same feel.

Using an Article You Like

Look at that article's keywords. Keywords are usually written underneath the article's listing in your search results. 

Different databases use different keywords. By reusing the keywords, you are learning to speak that database's "language".

Using Search Suggestions

Some databases will give you suggestions for search terms when you start typing in a search box. These are terms that the database absolutely recognizes. 

Sometimes, the suggestions will be several terms in the same text box, all separated by the Boolean Operator or. This means that the search engine will search for all those terms at once.

Always check before you select a string of terms. Some of the terms might not be equivalent for your specific research topic!

Searching in Google Scholar

General Tips

Make sure Google Scholar knows you are a student at South! You can access USA Libraries materials through Google Scholar. 

There are two ways to do this:

  • Log into Google Scholar with your USA account, just the same as you log into anything with your J number.
  • Have your JagMail open in another tab in the same browser.

Google Scholar is less selective than a database. It will include lower-quality journals and research articles. Pay attention to the quality of an article before using it in your research. Evaluate:

  • What are the authors researching? What is the point of the article?
  • Does the authors' experiment make sense?
  • Are there obvious, major grammatical errors in the article or on the journal website?

How to Search for Articles

Google Scholar doesn't have multiple separate search textboxes like most databases, but you can make your own separate textboxes with parentheses.

Example database search:

Screenshot of a search query in Academic Search Complete. The top textbox is: cyberbullying or "cyber bullying". The middle textbox is: children or adolescents or youth or teenager. The bottom textbox is: truancy or "student absenteeism" or "school attendance".

In Google Scholar, I can make my own textboxes with parentheses. I connect these groups with AND.

For my example search, it would look like this:

(cyberbullying or "cyber bullying") AND (children or adolescents or youth or child or teenager) AND (truancy or "student absenteeism" or "school attendance")

 

How to Read the Articles

You won't have access to every item listed in Google Scholar. 

If you can access a copy of the article, you will have "Full-Text@USA" as an option and/or you will have a PDF linked beside the article's description.

Screenshot of a Google Scholar result. The button "Full-Text@USA" is highlighted.

If you do not have access to the article, you can make an Interlibrary Loan request for a PDF of the article.