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 Articles

Where to Begin?

There are a few ways to find articles, depending on what kind of information you have:

• Specific article that you have a complete citation for...

  • Plug in all the citation information into the PSU Citation Linker
    • Click here for more information on how the Citation Linker works
      
      
  • If you have a citation for a specific article, then do a "Journal Title" search in our Catalog for the title of the journal.
    
    
  • If you cannot find the article, Ask Us!
  
  

• Specific article that you have an incomplete citation for...

  • Plug in as much citation information as you have into the PSU Citation Linker
    • Click here for more information on how the Citation Linker works
      
      
  • If you do not know the title of the journal the specific article was published in, but you know the title of the article, and/or the author, and/or the year, or some other combination of some of this information, try using the Multi-Search option that will look in several databases at once for that article.
    
    
  • If you cannot find the article, Ask Us!
    
    

• Just have a topic that you need to find articles on...

  • If you do not have specific articles you already know of, but you just need to find articles on a certain topic, you need to use a Database (see below).
    

Searching Databases for Articles

The first thing you have to do is pick an appropriate database to search for articles on your research topic. Click here for more information about database selection.

You can search databases much the same way as you search our library catalog, by Keyword or with an Advanced Search.

 

• Create a list of as many synonyms as you can think of for your topic and related themes to your topic

   

• Plug in one or two at a time, click on titles, read the abstracts, and note the subject headings for more words to plug back into the search boxes; play with the combination of terms you plug in to be more specific or more general to your topic

   

When you find citations for articles you want, you can usually print, save, or email them to yourself (and the full text when available), or export them to bibliographic software such as RefWorks or EndNote

 

 

 For more help, please Ask Us!