Tips:
Spelling counts! A foreign title or name, particularly from a culture that does not use the Roman alphabet, may have a couple of different alternate spellings. Make use of truncation and wildcards. If you know (or want to guess at) a couple of spellings, connect them with an 'or' Boolean operator.
When you’ve found a subject heading in our catalog, or in ConnectNY that seems well-suited to your research, note it. You can use it in other databases like WorldCat, ProjectMUSEor The History E-Book Project.
Don’t forget to talk to your professor and to ask a librarian if you need help finding sources (or even if you just want to make sure you’ve covered all your bases).
Finding Artcles:
| There are several ways to find articles for your research. We’ll cover the ones having to do with our resources here. Remember to read everything critically, but especially scholarship that comes from unvetted sources, specifically web sites. Scholarly publications like those found in JSTOR, and ProjectMUSE or in the indexes listed on our website publish articles that have been reviewed by experts. It’s better to get your information from the kinds of reputable publications in which your professors publish. Anyone can put anything on a web site. |
Full-text articles:
We have a number of searchable sources for full-text periodical articles, the two most helpful are JSTOR and ProjectMUSE. Both of these collections are exactly the kind of scholarly journals that your professors want you to read.
Here is a critical difference you need to bear in mind about these collections: JSTOR is a comprehensive archive of thousands of articles. Its coverage starts with volume 1 issue 1 and page 1 of a periodical. But, for the most part, coverage ends five years before the current year, so if you are reading this in 2008, the most recent articles you'll find on JSTOR will be from around 2003.
ProjectMUSE includes recent articles from over a hundred journals, but it does not have much of a backfile, and so the coverage in any given title will probably not go back much further than the mid-1990s.
To search either one can be a little tricky. ProjectMUSE actually assigns Library of Congress subject headings to their articles, so that is usually a pretty good way to search. You can also choose to search all fields but the full-text, which means that you can search the title, author, abstract and subject heading fields all at once. Go here for more help with searching ProjectMUSE help.
As a general rule, In full-text databases you don't want to search the full-text because that often yields a huge number of irrelevant articles. The searching mechanisms in these collections are looking for the incidence of the terms you've put into the search box in thousands of pretty long articles.
Your searching choices in JSTOR are limited to full-text, title, author and abstract. Unfortunately, a very small percentage of JSTOR articles have abstracts, and the articles do not have subject headings, so you are pretty much limited to searching the full-text. Here are a couple of handy tips: search terms that are strung together and enclosed in quotation marks are searched as a phrase. You can limit the kind of article you are looking for and/or the years of publication in the second section of the search page. Remember to choose the subject set(s) of journals at the bottom of the search screen. See JSTOR's help file for more searching tips.
The journals that comprise JSTOR's collection are considered to be among the most important journals in their respective fields, so these journals will usually be indexed in one or more of the indexes that we subscribe to. If searching JSTOR proves to be unproductive, try looking up a relevant journal from JSTOR's collection in our catalog, and then check the notes field of our catalog record to see where it is indexed. Search that index and then go back to JSTOR with the name of the author or the actual title.
ProjectMUSE actually provides lists of indexes for the titles in its collection here.
We have many other full-text databases, look for the full-text icon next to the title in our A-Z Indexes and Databases list.
Using Indexes:
As rich as JSTOR and ProjectMUSE are, they only cover a few of the many hundreds of journals in each discipline. For a more comprehensive view of scholarship in a given area, consult the indexes that cover the journals dedicated to that particular discipline.
On our webpage, click on A-Z Indexes and Databases By Subject and choose the appropriate subject. In that list, you’ll find databases that include full-text, some that offer just citations and some that are a hybrid of both.
Click on the index you want to use, and try typing in a couple of search terms, much as you would a Google search. If you get too many articles or irrelevant ones , use the Advanced Search, and search for your main idea as a subject or descriptor. If you get too many hits, try adding a keyword that might narrow your subject down.
The result should be a list of citations. Citations always include the following fields:
Author(s) of the article
Title, volume and issue of the periodical the article appeared in
Page numbers
Subject headings -- Very often these descriptions
are links, so if you find a subject that suits
your research, click on that link to get everything
in that index pertaining to that subject. If there
is no link, copy the subject description down,
and run a subject search using it.
Citations often include the following fields:
to that index (the number
of the citation within that database)
Standard number -- ISN, ISSN, ISBN -- these are unique numbers
given to periodicals (ISSNs) and books (ISBNs).
They are also sometimes required for interlibrary loans.
How to find an article in our databases or in the library:
When you find a citation for an article that you'd like to read, the first place to check is our A-Z Journal List. Type in the title of the journal (not the article). If we have an electronic subscription, the links that appear below the title will take you to the “journal level” of our subscription. From here, choose a year/volume/issue to get the table of contents and then click on the article you are looking for.
If we subscribe to a paper copy of the journal, click on “Bard College Print Holdings”. This will open up a link to our catalog. If the location given is Bard Periodicals, then the journal is in the Main Library. The numbers that follow the words "Library Has" show which volumes and dates respectively we have in bound journals housed in the Hoffman section of the library. A dash (-) at the end of a range of volumes and at the end of a range of dates indicates that we have an ongoing subscription, and that issues that follow that last volume/date will be located in Current Periodicals on the second floor of Stevenson. (Remember to pull the shelves up to see recent back issues.) The latest issue received is noted on the Latest Received line. All our periodicals, whether bound, microfilmed or current, are shelved in alphabetical order by title.
Bound journals whose titles start with -
D-Mu -- Hoffman 4
N-Rev -- Hoffman 2
Revue E-Z -- Hoffman 1
If the location given is Bard Microform, then back issues of that journal are stored on microfilm, and located in the microfilm cabinets on the first floor of Stevenson. They are arranged in alphabetical order by title. The cabinets on the northeast side of the room house the microfilm of journals whose titles start with the letter A to New York Times, 10/46. The cabinets on the southwest side of the room house our remaining reels. (We subscribe to The New York Times online from 1851 to three years ago.) For help using the microfilm reader/printer in Stevenson 1, see a librarian.
As always, if you have trouble locating your article, please see a librarian. We'd be happy to help.
Page Information
|
Wiki Information |
Recent PBwiki Blog Posts |
Create your own free wiki!