Searching in Databases
When searching in academic databases, you may not find exactly what you're looking for on the first search. Try:
- Using different keywords, synonyms, or related terms to your topic
- transgender, transsexual, gender variant, non-binary
- Connect broader concepts with AND to narrow your search
- gender AND sexuality AND body image
- Use quotes for phrases and terms you want to keep together
- "gender norms," "body image," "queer theory"
Use the limiters on the side:
Recommended Databases
General:
- OneSearch@IU Brings together much of IU Libraries' content, allowing users to simultaneously search IUCAT, scholarly article databases, news and popular publications to retrieve a wide range of materials across subject areas.
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- Academic Search (EBSCO) Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.
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Gender & Sexuality:
- Contemporary Women's Issues (Gale OneFile) A multidisciplinary, full-text database of articles about issues that influence women's lives around the world.
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- Gender Studies Database Citations to articles, books, conference papers, pamphlets, dissertations and other publications about gender inequality, masculinity, post-feminism, and gender identity.
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- GenderWatch Full text database with a focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas.
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- LGBTQ+ Source Index citations and selected full-text literature in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies
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- LGBT Thought and Culture LGBT Thought and Culture is an online resource hosting books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day.
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- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This database brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's activism in public life.
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Humanities/History:
- America: History & Life Bibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
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- Defining Gender, 1450-1910 Searchable full-text of advice literature covering household management, education, leisure, shoppping, sexuality, consumption and sport.
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- JSTOR Provides searchable full-text of historical runs of important scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, sciences, ecology, and business.
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- Project Muse Provides full text access and indexing for e-journals and e-books from a variety of scholarly publishers. Covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
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Social Sciences:
- ProQuest Congressional Provides easy access to congressional publications since 1789 and some full-text of reports, bills, resolutions, and laws to the present.
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- APA PsycINFO Indexes journal articles, books, dissertations and technical reports from the world literature on psychology and related fields.
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- Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) Covers concepts, theories and methods from both applied and theoretical aspects of the social sciences, and provides access to a wide assortment of English-language social science journals.
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Scholarly Source FAQs
What is a scholarly source?
A scholarly source is a text written or produced by an author who is a scholar in a particular field. These individuals are usually faculty, professors, or graduate students, in a academic department, such as Gender Studies, at a university.
Scholarly sources can be:
- Articles published in a journal
- Books or book chapters published by university or reputable press
- Conference papers and presentations
- Ph.D. Dissertations or Masters Theses
- Blog posts or tweets by a scholar
For this assignment, you'll probably rely more on articles and book chapters, but you may encounter other source types.
Why use scholarly sources?
Scholarly sources go through a process called peer-review, which means other scholars in the same field critique and review the article to ensure the content is accurate and credible before it's published. The peer-review process in more in-depth than a newspaper or magazine article that is usually only review by an editor or fact checker. Scholarly sources are generally considered more trustworthy.
How can you tell if a source is scholarly?
Look closely at the source and ask:
- Who is it written by? Look up the author(s). Are they affiliated with a university?
- Where was it published? Look up the journal to see if it's peer-reviewed or find out more about a book's publisher.
- How did you find it? If you're looking in some library databases, it may tell you in the search results what kind of source it is.