Cabrillo College Library

Periodicals are of two types: there are magazines, and there are journals. Here are the major characteristics of each.

Your instructor wants you to be ablt to find and use articles on specialized topics that have been published in academic peer-reviewed journal articles.

When an academic person submits an article to a journal, here's what happens. Let's say I was a political scientist interested in the environment, and had written something that I wanted to see if the journal Environment would publish. I would submit what I had written to the editors of Environment. They would send copies to my peers -- other political scientists with interests in the same subject field. Those colleagues, my peers, would review the paper and let the editor know whether it would be good to publish it, or suggest revisions, or say it should not be published.

Here's how you find peer-reviewed journal articles

1. From the Cabrillo College Library homepage, click on Articles and Databases
2. Click on Academic Search Premier
3. Click on “Advanced Search” and then enter keywords or terms related to your topic
   
   
   
   
4. A search for articles that are about politics and about the environment, that are full text in the database and that have been peer-reviewed, would look like this:

Using the asterisk ( * ) means that the search is for words beginning with those letters: politics, political, etc. and environment, environmental, etc.

From the results list, click on an article title to get full information about it.

Once you have the article on your screen, note that there are options about what to do with it --

Scholarly journal articles end with a list of references, notes, or a bibliography, e.g.,

Your turn! You can make notes on this sheet, or, if you want, you can open a Word document and take notes on it. To bring up Word -- START -> Programs -> Word.

1. From the Cabrillo College Library homepage, click on Articles and Databases
2. Click on Academic Search Premier
3. Click on “Advanced Search” and then enter keywords or terms related to your topic
4. Click on the little box next to the word Full Text to limit your search to full-text articles only
5. Type in your search terms and click on

If you don't have a topic already in mind, use one of these:

• political corruption in a democracy
• civil rights and terrorism
• secrecy in the U.S. government
• media as watchdog
• politics of health care reform

Note down information about at least one article you found:

Article author__________________________________________________________

Article title____________________________________________________________

Periodical title (look where it says Source)__________________________________

Date of publication__________________________

Page numbers______________________________

Bring up the article and scroll to the bottom. Does it close with a bibliography or a list of references of some kind? ___yes; ___no

Do you see where you can click to email the article? To print it? To cite it?

In writing citations for this course, you will want to use APA Style. APA stands for the American Psychological Association and is the most widely used style for writing citations in the social sciences.

To get to this page on the Internet

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage http://libwww.cabrillo.edu
2. Click on Web Resources by Subject
3. Click on Political Science
4. Under Course-Related Materials, click on Finding Academic Journal Articles

tns 6/08; last rev. 9/10