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SY 372: Social Gerontology: Articles

This guide was made to support Dr. Kelley's SY 372 course in Fall 2024.

What are Scholarly Articles and Where do I Find Them?

Scholarly articles are papers written by (usually multiple) experts in a subject and published in academic journals. The experts submit the papers they have written to be published in academic journals. These papers focus on specific topics and may be written about new research studies, case studies, reviews of previous research, or other research-related topics.

Academic journals are run by editors and published by publishing companies, universities, or professional associations. Most academic journals use a peer-review process to review articles for quality. Most academic journals have scopes, and they only publish articles that fit within the journal's scope. An academic journal that doesn't have a peer-review review process or has a very broad scope has warning signs of being low-quality. 

A database is a collection of many different academic journals that can all be searched at once. Databases allow you to limit your search by certain filters, usually including by peer-review status. This is a way to feel more secure that you are being shown quality articles published in quality journals.

You can search a database by creating and submitting a search query. Based off your search query, you will get a list of articles (and other resources) as results.

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:

Screenshot of Academic Search Complete search function. Two terms are entered, "cooking shows" and "health behavior."

Tricks for Choosing Search Terms

Using Your Research Question

You can turn your research question into search terms. This is a good way to make sure that you are looking for resources that relate to your paper's scope and topic. 

Identify the important words or terms in your research question. These are more likely to be the nouns that you use to specify the scope of your topic. 

Write out each important word/term as it appears in your research question. Next to the term, list synonyms. You can also search words that mean the same thing. 

You can use our digital search term worksheet to turn your research question into search terms.

Using an Article You Like

When you find an article you like, look at that article's keywords. These are the words the database attaches to the article. They are usually written underneath the article's listing in your search results. 

Different databases use different keywords. By reusing the keywords that the database likes, 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 term textbox. You can select those suggestions if you want. Of course, you can always type out your own text to search, but these suggestions are terms that the database absolutely recognizes. 

Often, the suggestions will be several terms in the same box, all separated by 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 research topic!