Find Information — Searching for Articles

Why use articles instead of or in addition to books? Depends on your needs.

• You need really current research or news reports
• Your interest is specific not broad (and you have a good background understanding of your topic)
• Required in your assignment or by your professor (primary research, peer-reviewed article, eye-witness accounts, etc.)

Where are articles found? In periodicals which are found in databases.

A Periodical -- as its name might imply -- is something that appears periodically, namely daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. Each time they are published, the content is completely new and different from any previous issues.

• Newspapers - Who, what, when, where. Basic vocabulary, current news, eye-witness accounts, (current and historical)
• Magazines - easy reading, informative, general public readership
• Scholarly journals (aka peer-reviewed, academic, refereed, research) - Analysis & research: College level
• Professional or Trade periodicals - more news and short reports on updates for professionals working in their field

Watch this short video for a brief overview brief databases and how to find databases available from the UConn Library. https://learningmodules.lib.uconn.edu/videos/articledb.mp4

How do articles differ from books?

• Articles are short: from part of a page to 20 or more pages. Usually, they are between 5 and 10 pages. 
• Articles are narrowly focused (e.g., one event, one experiment, one historical moment or short time period, one hypothesis), though they may also contain review articles or literature reviews which summarize recent published work in a field.

Search Tips

A scholarly article title can often be long and descriptive. It describes the issues or problems being researched and sometimes more. It summarizes the content of the article. Newspaper and magazine article titles may be provocative or otherwise try to entice you to read them. For example:

• Peer-reviewed article title - "Strength training versus robot-assisted gait training after incomplete spinal cord injury: a randomized pilot study in patients depending on walking assistance" from Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation
  Newspaper article title - "The Skinny on This Hot Workout: Fans Gain Seam-Busting Bulk." (Wall Street Journal)

To find the two articles above, the keywords used were -- strength training.

When searching for articles in databases, do not write a question or sentence. Use specific relevant terms (mainly nouns) in separate boxes and perhaps add synonyms all in one box with OR between them. Say we wanted to add an age group to be more specific. Example:

Line 1 : Strength training

Line 2 : college students OR adolescents (using synonyms increases your number and breadth of search results)

Line 3 : (if you have any other qualifier)

Most of our databases allow you to add even more lines. Each concept on a separate line! Your results will improve.