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HMS 101 & 201

Journal Articles & Databases

The Pratt Libraries provide both print and electronic access to finding articles from magazines, journals and newspapers. To find articles on a topic, try searching our online databases. To find a specific article, try our E-Journals search.

Databases contain citations, which often include brief summaries (called "abstracts"), helping you decide which articles are useful.

If the full-text of an article is not included with the citation in a database, you will need the citation to locate the full text article in either another database or in its print version. 

How do I find the databases?

The easiest way to get to the Databases List is via Quick Links on the right side of the Libraries Homepage. You access the Databases List via the Find Resources tab at the top of the Homepage.  

The Find Resources page also offers helpful searching tips & strategies.

Databases

To find articles on a topic, use library databases (a.k.a. periodical indexes).

*Remember that PrattCat, the library catalog, lists books and journals or magazines by their titles, not by the individual book chapters or articles contained within these materials. Databases do list (or index) individual articles and sometimes even book chapters. For this reason, using databases is important.

The following databases will be useful for literature-related research. You should consider searching in both general / multi-disciplinary databases, as well as discipline-specific databases, like those focused on literary topics and the humanities.

Get Help w/Research

Finding Articles

This video shows how to find articles through the libraries' databases. To enlarge the video, click on the bottom right corner of the player.

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Search Terms for Databases

Listed are possible terms to use in PrattCat when searching for books related to literature.

What other search terms can you think of yourself?

There's no one "right" search. In fact, several searches will probably work best!

Possible Search Terms:

analysis / analytical

anthology

author

collection

criticism / critical

fiction

non-fiction

novel

short-story

poetry

prose

theory / theoretical

writer / writing

Citations are Important

Once you determine that an article appears to be relevant to your topic, you will need to locate the full text as well as cite the article later in your Bibliography or Works Cited page. For these reasons, make sure to save (email, write down, or save electronically) the full citation of your article.

A full citation includes the article title, journal or magazine title, volume, number, month, year, as well as page numbers. If you found your full text article via a database or online magazine, you will want to record that information for your bibliography, too. 


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