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SOC 226 | Women & Gender Issues

Where to Begin

The databases listed below will lead you to journal articles on the women and gender issues.

A good starting point: Gender Studies.

Image: Mother, son.  Jason Regan. CC BY 2.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Find

If your topic deals with a particular subject area (business, music, etc.), you may also find information on gender and women's issues in  subject specific databases--for example, Business Source Complete, CINAHL (health) Education Full-Text, EconLit,or  Music Index.

How Can I Tell?

Almost all of the library's databases will allow you to limit to academic/scholarly, or peer-reviewed journals.  Limiting to academic/scholarly, however, is imperfect:  You'll also retrieve professional journals.  Some professors consider these scholarly; others don't.  

Ask to clarify.

How can you tell what it is you found? You'll need to look for clues.  None of these clues may be consistently applied--taken together, however, they can get you close.  

  • Journal in the journal title.  You can't apply this clue blindly-- Ladies' Home Journal is not scholarly.
  • Subject specific terminology or language within the article title.
  • High page numbers.  Typically scholarly journals continuously paginate January through December.  Thus, after the publication of the first volume, you'll see high page numbers. This is an important clue--probably the one you can count on most.  Still, imperfect.
  • References or Works Cited within the article.  Again, imperfect.  Look for other clues.
  • Abstract is contained within the article (useful only if you can pull up the full-text of the article)  Again, imperfect.
  • Authors identified within the article as having come from a university, college, or research facility.  Imperfect.  Look for other clues.

Still unsure?  Check Ulrich's Periodicals Directory for the definitive word on whether your source is scholarly or general.

Image source: Syker Fotograf.  GNU GPL.  Wikimedia Commons.   

Primo

With Primo Search, you can find books, e-books, movies, music, audiobooks, full-text articles, images, dissertations, theses and more.