Sociology Subject Guide — Where to Find Articles?

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 sociological research:

 Searching for articles in sociology is not hard, but you should plan to structure your approach 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. Research terminology changes through time.
• When searching a general and/or multidisciplinary database maximize your results add the keywords sociological or sociology as additional keywords:
  • E.g. "racial inequality" AND sociological
• This technique works too when searching Google Scholar

When searching a sociological database or journal, you don't need to use the words sociological or sociology. Use the thesaurus or search using the keywords that best describe your research topic.

Hint: When searching databases for book reviews, remember to limit your search to that type of document. Each database is different so check the Advance Search to find where to limit/filter/narrow your search: E.g.

• EBSCO databases use Document Type ►Book Review
• JSTOR uses Narrow By ►Item Type ► Reviews