Finding sources for your paper
To write your research paper you need to find "sources": academic/scholarly/peer-review articles, books and book chapters, videos, all of these are types of "sources" of information that you need to write about a topic.
Tips for searching for anthropological or archeological research:
Searching for articles in anthropology is not hard but it needs some planning before starting:
- Create a list of synonyms on your topic
- You can use your syllabus or textbook to find some preliminaries keywords
- Pay attention what phrases scholars used to describe the topic you are interested in. Research terminology change through time.
- When searching a general and/or multidisciplinary database maximize your results add the keywords, "anthropology", "archaeology", "anthropological" or "archaeological" as an additional keyword
- E.g. Use "coming of age" ritual "anthropological studies"
- This technique works too when searching Google Scholar
When searching an anthropological database or journal, you don't need to use the words anthropological or archeological
Finding Articles
- Academic Search Premier
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Includes articles from scholarly journals and popular magazines covering a wide variety of disciplines with the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
- SocINDEX with Full TextScholarly journal articles about sociology and other social and behavioral sciences, including anthropology. Includes culture & social structure; economic development; evaluation research; family & social welfare; management and complex organizations; policy planning.
- JSTOREssential scholarly journals in many academic fields, especially social sciences, e.g. anthropology, arts, literature, humanities, and biology. Most recent 2-5 years not available. Good place to do literature review of your research topic, but not for the most recent research.
- Project MUSEFull-text of over 200 journals in the social sciences, e.g. anthropology, sociology, etc.
- Google Power Searching Quick ReferenceThis document teaches you the best way to search either Google or Google scholar to find the best and more relevant articles for your research project.
- AnthroSourceArticles from 15 scholarly journals published by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Instead of searching the whole database, limit your search to the journal American Anthropologist.
- eHRAF World CulturesIncludes ethnographic primary source materials on hundreds of cultures and ethnic groups describing cultural and social life.
- Oxford Bibliographies - AnthropologyProvides an annotated bibliography covering books in the field of anthropology.
- Anthropology PlusA compilation of the Anthropological Index Online and Anthropological Literature databases, this resource is an extensive index of bibliographic materials covering the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and related interdisciplinary research.
- AnthroSourceInstead of searching the whole database, limit your search to either a specialized journal that focus on ecological or environmental issues such Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment or a general one such as American Anthropologist.
- Agricola
Indexes articles in agriculture, including plant and animal sciences, forestry, entomology, soil and water resources, agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, alternative farming practices, and food and nutrition.
- GreenFILE
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Articles on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and recycling.
- Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)Indexes scholarly articles in linguistics; language (speech sounds, sentence and word structure, meaning in language forms, spelling, phonetics); and speech, language, and hearing. 1973-current.
- PubMedScholarly journal articles about health and medicine, nursing, audiology, and biology. It covers topics such as genetics, forensic sciences, etc...
- BIOSIS Citation IndexMultidisciplinary database in the life sciences (General biology, botany, molecular biology, zoology, microbiology, ecology and evolution). Content overlap other disciplines such as experimental, clinical and veterinary medicine, biotechnology and genetics, agriculture and nutrition, biochemistry, pharmacology and public health.
- AnthroSourceInstead of searching the whole database, limit your search to the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
- PubMedScholarly journal articles about health and medicine, nursing, audiology, and biology.
- PsycInfo (APA PsycInfo)
Scholarly articles in psychology, plus medicine, psychiatry, education, social work, criminology, social science, business, & organizational behavior.
- BIOSIS Citation Index
Article abstracts and conference documents from the world's life sciences literature, covering more than 5,200 journals.
- eHRAF World CulturesIncludes ethnographic primary source materials on hundreds of cultures and ethnic groups describing cultural and social life.
- Anthropology Plus
Indexes worldwide materials from the late 1800s to today in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology; ethnology, archaeology, folklore, and material culture.
- AnthroSourceInstead of searching the whole database, limit your search to these journals: American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (for Indigenous people outside the U.S.), Cultural Anthropology. For archeological journals, check Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association or American Anthropologist for Old Archeology research.
- AnthroSourceArticles from 15 scholarly journals published by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Instead of searching the whole database, limit your search to the journal Archeological Papers of the AAA.
Archeological Journals that you can search too:
Finding Books and Videos
- General SearchYour one stop shopping to find books, articles and films.
Tip to find films: use the keyword "videorecording" to narrow your search only to DVDs. Otherwise you will get results for CDs and VHS (Not what you want!)
- Ethnographic Video OnlineYou can search this databases of films for ethnographic and anthropological movies.
