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First Year Experience

Library resource guide for first year and new to Augustana students.

Journal Articles

Below are listed some of the library's resources that librarians typically suggest to students as they are starting the research process.  Make sure to read the resource's description in order to learn about the content you can find in each resource.  These resources contain both scholarly (typically from academic journals) and popular articles (found in newspapers, magazines, non-scholarly journal publications), so you'll need to pay attention to what type of information you're looking at.  See here for more information about the Peer-Review process.

To see our full list of resources, please refer to our A-Z resources list. You can narrow down the selection by selecting "Subject Type." 

Find books, articles, movies, and more.

Advanced Search

OneSearch provides a simple way to search for books, eBooks, videos, articles, journals, and more, all in one place. In the search box above, you will see a drop-down list of options for filtering your search. To find articles, you have several options:

  • ​Tredway resources (Library holdings + Articles): This is the default option which searches all of the library's physical and electronic resources (books, eBooks, videos, journal/magazine articles, and electronic references sources). This search also includes items in Special Collections and the Swenson Center.
  • Articles only: This option searches for journal articles, magazine articles, newspapers articles, and electronic reference material across our databases.
  • Everything (Library holdings + Articles + I-Share): This option searches across everything, including articles from our databases. 

Advanced Search

To perform an advanced search, click on the "advanced search" link located just below the OneSearch box above. You will not only be able to select which collections to search in, you'll also see different fields you can enter your search terms in. You can also limit by material type, language, and publication date. 

If an article doesn't have a full-text link in the database, it doesn't mean you can't access the article! Follow these steps to locate the full-text of an article.

  1. Look carefully to be sure there isn't a link to the full text. It might say "full text" or it might say "PDF full text" or "HTML full text."
  2. If you don't see a full-text link, visit the library homepage and enter three or more words from the article title in the search box, in quotation marks.  
    For example, to find this article:
    Foster, Jacob G., Andrey Rzhetsky, and James A. Evans. "Tradition and innovation in scientists’ research strategies." American Sociological Review 80.5 (2015): 875-908.
    ...you might copy/paste "tradition and innovation in scientists'" to the OneSearch box.


     
  3. If Augustana doesn't have immediate access to the article you need, request it through Interlibrary Loan.

Saving Your Articles and Permalinks

Finding your research is one thing, saving it reliably is another.  Most databases have nice and clear options for downloading the articles you find directly, for sending them to your Google Drive, or for emailing them to yourself.

Another option is to save the article's Permalink or DOI (Digital Object Identifier).  Below is a screenshot showing how to find the Permalink option in the Academic Search Complete database rather than copying the URL from the browser.  The interface may be different in other databases, but there will usually be an option for a permalink, sometimes called a "Get Link" or a "Stable URL."

Never copy the URL directly from the address bar to save your research -- this will work in some rare cases, but more often when using databases the URL in your browser's address bar will be what is known as a "session link" based on your current search session.  Session links expire and will not allow you to access the resource again in the future.

Trust me on this, I see someone lose their research every semester because of this!

Advanced Database Search Tricks

Most databases tend to share a number of the same search tricks as you can use in our OneSearch catalog.

  • About stop words -- Many databases ignore very common English words and contractions, sometimes called "stop words" (such as a, an, the, in, of, on, if, into, etc.).  Be careful when using stop words in searches as you may get unexpected results (e.g. searching for "Into the Wild" will tend to ignore both "into" and "the" and search only for "wild" -- though some databases are getting better at parsing these).
  • Use quotations marks to keep phrases together like "West Side Story" and "social justice". But be careful -- make sure something is really a phrase or you might miss important results. Stop words may also still be ignored in exact phrase searches!
  • Use truncation (putting * after the root of a word) to find variations of a word. Librar* finds library, libraries, librarian, and librarians. This can be a very useful tool for expanding a search to include related terms.
  • Using boolean operators -- these are simple words (AND, OR, NOT) used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search, resulting in more focused and productive results. This should save time and effort by eliminating inappropriate hits that must be scanned before discarding.  Some databases will have a dropdown menu next to search boxes to make easier use of these operators.
    • AND -- requires both terms to be in each item returned. If one term is contained in the document and the other is not, the item is not included in the resulting list. (Narrows the search)
    • OR -- either term (or both) will be in the returned document. (Broadens the search) 
    • NOT -- the first term is searched, then any records containing the term after the operators are subtracted from the results. (Be careful with use as the attempt to narrow the search may be too exclusive and eliminate good records). If you need to search the word not, that can usually be done by placing double quotes around it.
  • Using parentheses -- Using the ( ) to enclose search strategies will customize your results to more accurately reflect your topic. Search engines deal with search statements within the parentheses first, then apply any statements that are not enclosed.
    • Example: A search on (smoking or tobacco) and cancer returns articles containing: smoking and cancer; tobacco and cancer; smoking, tobacco, and cancer all together; but does not return results about smoking or tobacco when cancer is not mentioned.