COMS 600: Core Seminar

Overview

Periodical articles (magazines, newspapers, trade publications, and scholarly journals) are excellent sources for research projects.

Check Ulrich's to see if a journal is peer-reviewed/referreed.

Databases allow you to search with "keywords" to help you identify relevant articles. Keywords are words that represent the main ideas of what you are searching for within your research. 

The list of databases below is broad-based and are good places to start your initial research. To see all of the databases the Library offers, visit Databases by Subject or Databases A-Z.

Article Databases:

General:

Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost)

Provides full text for nearly 4,600 periodicals, including more than 3,900 full-text peer-reviewed journals. This database offers information in nearly every area of academic study. Allows limiting search results to peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Communication Source (EBSCOhost)

Communication Source offers abstracts and indexing as well as full-text content from publications worldwide pertaining to Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric and Discourse, Speech-Language Pathology, Media Studies and other fields relevant to the discipline.

Dissertations & Theses (Proquest)

Collection of scholarly research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, covering more than 1 million dissertations and theses.

EBSCOhost Research Databases

Search across a wide range of general and subject specific databases, including resources previously provided by H.W. Wilson.

Ethnic NewsWatch (ProQuest)

Full text articles from more than 270 ethnic, minority and native press publications, including newspapers, magazines and journals, 1960 to present.

GenderWatch (ProQuest)

Searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed articles, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and reports across many disciplines and sources. See Using Google Scholar and Library Resources for instructions on configuring Google Scholar and Library Resources.

Proquest Databases

Search across a wide range of newspapers, and databases in business and social sciences.

ProQuest Global NewsStream

Full text access to a large selection of national and international newspapers, news wires and news sources. Coverage includes 1984-present.

PsycINFO

Abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations devoted to the peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health.

Primary Sources

Primary sources are original materials on which other research is based. It includes documents such as poems, diaries, court records, interviews, surveys, fieldwork, and some newspaper articles. It also includes research results generated by experiments, which are published as journal articles in some fields of study.

They are also sets of data, such as census statistics, which have been tabulated, but not interpreted.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources describe or analyze the primary sources.

Examples of secondary sources include: dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and books and articles that interpret or review research works.

Tertiary Sources

Examples of tertiary sources includes indexes and abstracts which serve to locate secondary and primary sources. An index will provide a citation which fully identifies the work: author, title of article, title of journal or book, publisher and date of publication, For a journal it will include the volume, issue and pagination. An abstract is a summary of the work being cited. Many indexes and abstract are available now online.