LibGuides at USA: AN 454: Anthropological Theory: Home

Welcome!

Hello, I am Heather, and I am the librarian for your discipline!

I have created this guide to supplement AN 454, Anthropological Theory.

This guide will help you find resources. You don't need to use outside resources in your writing assignments in Dr. Sanchez's course, but you may want to supplement the provided resources with other items online.

This guide will show you how to find peer-reviewed articles through the USA Library.

If you have any questions, please email me at hmbutler@southalabama.edu. Include your course number and professor's name in the subject line.

Anthropology Search Video: follow along with me in a search for anthropology-related journal articles!

Why Use Library Databases?

A database is a collection of many different journals that can all be searched at once. Databases allow you to limit your search by certain filters, usually including by peer-review status.

Anthropology Databases

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 12,500 journals and a total of more than 13,200 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
AnthroSource This link opens in a new window
AnthroSource is a digital searchable database containing past, present and future American Anthropological Association publications.

Suggested Search Terms

For this course's assignments, you would only be looking for online articles that can supplement the class's readings.

The class readings are a great place to find search terms to use in your online searches. Search terms are the words or phrases you enter into the search boxes to create a search.

You can borrow search terms from your assigned readings:

Use important words in the Chapter Titles
Look for the main ideas at the beginning of paragraphs
At each passage, ask yourself, "What is this section about?"

How to Create a Search Query

A database is searched by creating a search query. A search query is the combination of search terms, filters, and code that you type or select before clicking the search button.

Search terms are the words or phrases you want the search feature to look for.
- Different databases search different parts of the text. Some databases, like JSTOR or newspaper collections, only do a full-text search. Their search features will only pull items that have those phrases in the actual text.
- Other databases, like Academic Search complete, will search the actual text and the description of the text.
- Many databases have multiple textboxes where you can enter multiple search terms at once. You do not need to put a term in every textbox.
Filters are selections built into the search feature. You can choose different filters to narrow down your results. Common filters are by publication date or by language.
Code includes any special terms or punctuation to add to your search. Some search features might not understand every code.
- ? or * are commonly use to truncate your searches. This means that a search for: read* will really search for any word that starts with read. The articles you get shown might contain the words "read," "readers," or "readmit".

This is an example of a search in Academic Search Complete:

This is an example of a search in JSTOR: