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HIS 300

A guide to HIS 300 research worksheets.

Finding journals by topic

Finding an entire journal that relates to your topic can be tricky.  In some cases you might be focusing on a time period or an event (renaissance, civil war) where there might be one or more dedicated journals.  But let's say I am researching the history of the birth control pill in the US.  It is really unlikely there is a whole journal on that topic.  So, I might instead look for broader journals on American history or social history.

Steps:

1) I've always had the best luck getting titles by searching in google.  I will just do a search like:  social history journals or best civil war journals. 

2) The nice part about doing this through a browser search is that it often gives you links to the main journal website.  Go in and find the About the Journal or Scope page, so you can learn more about the journal.

3) Once you have a title or two that look good, go the library Find Journals search and see if we have access to that journal.

4)  Click on the title of the journal, then scroll down to find a list of where to find the journal and what years are held in each database.

  • Notice in the example below that while there are a lot of databases, only Project Muse has articles from the most recent year and only JSTOR goes all the way back to 1967.

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