Articles/Databases
Find online journals and databases as well as print periodicals for your research needs
Searching for Articles
COTC Subject Research Guides: The COTC Library has many helpful subject research guides; browse these guides to find more recommended databases
Or, narrow your search by using Find Journals through the OSU Libraries Catalog.
Using Databases
Research Databases are services provided by publishers and other vendors. Some are periodical indexes which give citations to specific articles in magazines and professional journals and have links to the full text of articles. Others are the online versions of print sources which give various sorts of information, from statistics to demographics to encyclopedic essays. Still others are public sites on the Internet that we link to. The Warner Library has access to many of them.
For help locating the right subject-specific database for your research, you can take a look at our Resource Guides.
Periodicals
Periodicals at Warner Library—three possibilities:
- We have a current subscription to it or own a run of back issues. It will be located on our shelves.
- There is a link from the record in the database that you are using to the full text of the article; it can be printed from the index database.
- You can obtain a copy of it from another library. Email us with your article citation request.
Popular vs. Scholarly Journals
What are Scholarly or Professional Journals?
The term here refers to scholarly journals, not to diaries or personal accounts. These are the characteristics of such journals:
Purpose: Report results of original research, examine existing theories and present new interpretations, review and analyze previous research studies on a topic.
Authors: Scholars with relevant credentials (degrees appropriate to the field of study).
Format: Articles always cite sources in footnotes or bibliographies, may include charts, graphs or tables, but usually few photographs.
Frequency: Many are published quarterly, but some are more frequent.
Language: Assume some scholarly background on the part of the reader, uses terminology of the field or discipline.
Publisher: Often, but not always, published by scholarly or professional organizations. Some commercial (for profit) publishers also produce scholarly journals. Journal publishers may require authors to pay production fees.
Selection: Many scholarly journals are “refereed,” that is, a panel of experts reads prospective articles and selects those with scholarly merit. (“Peer Reviewed” means the same thing as “refereed”.) The journal’s “editorial statement” may indicate whether a journal is refereed. The library owns guides which also give this information.
Here are some examples of scholarly journals in our library collection:
How are popular journals (magazines) different?
Audience: Articles are usually written by journalists or professional writers for a general audience.
Length: Articles are usually shorter than scholarly journal articles.
Author: The author is journalist or professional writer; it is not always clear who the author is.
Style: The Content is easy to comprehend by the general reader.
Here are some examples of popular magazines in our library collection:
Finding Articles Online
Search Engines:
The best search engine in the world is the one that you actually know how to use. Most of them have an advanced search capacity which most people never bother to examine. If you do, you will discover whether the engine accepts search strings in which terms are connected with AND, OR, AND NOT, or whether it recognizes search symbols like + and -.
Click the links below to find out the best way to do effective searching:
Google: When doing a Google search, it is important to familiarize yourself with the engine’s operator strings. Try these tips: use quotes to find an exact phrase, use “site:” to search only a specific site, or “–” to exclude a term from your results. You can also use the Advanced Search interface to add criteria like reading level, language, file type, and date, and turn SafeSearch (the content-filtering option) on or off.
Dogpile: Dogpile is a metasearch engine that fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, About.com and several other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers.
Bing
Yahoo