Before an article is published in a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal, it is sent by the journal's editors to other scholars in the field (the author's "peers") to review for the quality of the scholarship, its relevance to the field, its appropriateness for the journal, the validity of its arguments, and its adherence to the editorial standards of the journal. The high standard of writing, content, and research set by peer reviewers results in high-quality scholarly articles on your subject, and this is why your professors want you to use these sources.
UC Library Search discovery platform will retrieve articles and books, but I strongly recommend that you use the Library's article databases to search for peer-reviewed articles on your topic rather than relying on Library Search. The article databases listed at the right will be particularly useful for your English 197 research.
To find articles in scholarly journals, you need to search an index database. Here are the basic steps:
1. Decide which database to use.
2. There is no single database devoted to ethnic literature. Because the subject crosses many disciplines, you may be browsing through multiple databases in fields such as Feminist Studies, Black Studies, Sociology, Asian American Studies, and others. The databases listed at right should give you a good start. You can also browse a list of the Library's databases organized by subject or alphabetically.
3. Always use the Advanced Search option.
4. Databases don't like full sentences! Build your search using a few words that best describe the main concepts of your topic. These are your "keywords." Avoid adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and any other terms that are not considered essential to your topic.
5. Select whichever filters are appropriate but do not click "full text" as one of the filters because this will severely limit your results. See #6 below.
6. If the full text of an article is not available in the database itself, use the link. This will take you to the online article on another platform or, if we don't have access to the online version, it will offer you an option to order it through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
7. Most article databases allow you to save, email, cite, download, or export citations or full articles.
Indexes books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage includes journal articles, series, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies.
Contains citations to articles on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Covers over 2,000 journals published worldwide. Includes selected historical journals from major countries, state and local history journals, and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
Covers thousands of research journals, and extensive collections of conference proceedings and books across hundreds of disciplines.
Web of Science consists of the following databases:
Contains news, culture and history from the ethnic, minority and native press. Includes complete articles and archival material. Searchable in both English and Spanish, with titles in both languages; more than 100,000 articles are in Spanish.
Materials Indexed: Newspaper Articles, Book Reviews
Scholarly, multi-disciplinary database covering thousands of journals and other publications. Includes full-text access to peer-reviewed journals, and indexing/abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings.
A primary resource for accessing the latest research sponsored in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Draws information from an international selection of thousands of journals and other sources.