Specialized academic and encyclopedic material: find academic articles and definitions. Excellent beginning resource. Find the Career Information Center here!
Electronic editions of record of newspapers, many in California, for valuable local, regional, and national U.S. newspapers--all in one easy-to-search database-- providingunique coverage of local and regional news, including companies, politics, sports, industries, cultural activities, and people in the community. Paid ads are excluded.
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Covers newspapers, magazines, wire services, federal and state court opinions, federal and state statutes, federal regulations, and SEC filings such as 10-Ks,10-Qsand their exhibits. News information is updated daily and wire services several times daily. Research areas in LexisNexis Academic cover top news, general news topics, and news transcripts; non-English language news sources; company, industry, and market news; legal news; company financial information; general medical and health topics and medical abstracts; accounting, auditing, and tax information; law reviews; federal case law; U.S. Code; and state legal research.
Academic journal articles are reports of an expert's original research, analysis, or review of the research available on a topic. In history, the most common kinds of articles are research papers, historiographies, and book reviews/review articles. These specialized reports are published in journals, which are publications aimed at professionals and scholars.
In general, journal articles usually have the following parts:
Journals are not always found freely online. As a Merced College student, however, you have free access to academic journals through the library databases.
Some journals are also refeered or peer-reviewed, which means that other experts have double-checked that the work is sound. When searching the library databases, you can limit your results to items that are peer-reviewed.
Because these are professional sources of information, journal articles are not the best resources to use for basic or background information. For example, if you need to know the major factors that led to the U.S. Civil War, the better resource to use would be a textbook or encyclopedia. Journal articles are better at delving into topics that are more narrow in focus. For example, an article might focus on the economic structure of South Carolina rice plantations.
Here are some links to help you understand the basic parts of an academic journal article and advice for how to read journal articles.
Redirect page for list of all EBSCO databases: CINAHL, Medline, Newsbank, Academic Search Premiere, Science Direct and Sport Discus are the most popular databases of the 32 that reside here.
Academic Search Complete (this is where the Chronicle of Higher Education is located)
MasterFile Complete
OmniFile Full Text Select
4. Talk to a librarian for an individual session on this important database!
Use Google Scholar to help you discover other scholarly items.
Use this handout to help you figure out the parts of a journal article record. This will help you when you need to put your works cited page together.