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POSI 3314: State and Local Government: Finding articles

Dr. Fields

Where to Search

Use Research Databases to find articles on your topic.

Political Science Databases are a great place to start your research, but other subjects may also be helpful, especially the Multi-Subject Databases. 

Many of the articles contain full-text, meaning that the actual article is available in the database.   

Databases contain proprietary content from a variety of scholarly journals, conference proceedings, books, dissertations, and more.

Additional databases

For additional government research, try one of these sources.

How to Search

Searching by keywords and phrases. Maximize your keyword searches with Boolean searching:
 

AND aquifer AND drought all words must appear in the search results
OR streamflow OR "stream measurement" either word/phrase may appear in the search results
NOT "san marcos" NOT california search results must include "san marcos,
but excludes items "california"
Note: some databases use AND NOT rather than just NOT

Use "quotation marks" to search for phrases. 

Consider truncation. The asterisk (*) symbol is used most often and searches for variations of a word:    

Entering in stand* will give results containing: stands, standing, standards, standardize, etc. 

Try using the database’s subject or descriptor terms. Those are listed in the database’s thesaurus, or they may be listed near the article abstract. These can be useful for learning the preferred vocabulary of a discipline.

Suggested Databases