Skip to Main Content

SPARK: Student Papers and Academic Research Kit: Locating Articles

A guide to successful academic papers.

Locating Articles

Finding Articles

Search databases to find newspaper, magazine and journal articles, as well as images, literacy criticism, music, reports, case studies, recipes and more. VCC Library subscribes to many different article databases. Find them listed by subject area in our list of databases.

These databases will give you either the complete article (full-text) or links to a citation and abstract for the article. To access them from home, you must use your myVCC login and password.

** Here is a 3-minute video showing how to search Academic Search Complete, one of our most popular article indexes.

Additional tips for searching the online databases:

  • Search the databases using keywords that describe your topic
  • Use advanced search features such as:
    • Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
    • "controlled vocabularies" (a specific list of words or phrases, like a thesaurus, that will help you find the best articles more easily)
    • field searching : will let you search for words in parts of the record (like in the title, abstract or article text)

Once you have identified the existence of an article (or other digital resource) using the Library Catalogue or a specific library database, there are several possible ways to access the full-text of the article:

  • In the Library Catalogue Record,. a link to Access options or Downloading will give you the full text article. If it isn't available, check if the library can obtain it for you from Interlibrary loan (ILL)

Finding Articles -VCC

Find Articles

Google Scholar

Stand on the shoulders of giants (With a bit of help from the Library)

Google Scholar offers a straightforward method for searching a wide range of scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other websites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
*The results are often very useful, except that the full text of many of the articles retrieved is not available directly from Google. Many require subscriptions, which the library can help you with.

Google Scholar Search Help

Get the most out of Google Scholar with some helpful tips on searches, email alerts, citation export, and more.

Finding recent papers

Your search results are normally sorted by relevance, not by date. To find newer articles, try the following options in the left sidebar:

  1. click "Since Year" to show only recently published papers, sorted by relevance;
  2. click "Sort by date" to show just the new additions, sorted by date;
  3. click the envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email.

Locating the full text of an article

Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Alas, reading the entire article may require a subscription. Here're a few things to try:

  1. click a library link, e.g., "FindIt@Harvard", to the right of the search result;
  2. click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;
  3. click "All versions" under the search result and check out the alternative sources;
  4. click "Related articles" or "Cited by" under the search result to explore similar articles.

* If you're affiliated with a university, but don't see links such as "FindIt@Harvard", please check with your local library about the best way to access their online subscriptions. You may need to do search from a computer on campus, or to configure your browser to use a library proxy.

Getting better answers

  • If you're new to the subject, it may be helpful to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. E.g., a Wikipedia article for "overweight" might suggest a Scholar search for "pediatric hyperalimentation".

  • If the search results are too specific for your needs, check out what they're citing in their "References" sections. Referenced works are often more general in nature.

  • Similarly, if the search results are too basic for you, click "Cited by" to see newer papers that referenced them. These newer papers will often be more specific.

  • Explore! There's rarely a single answer to a research question. Click "Related articles" or "Cited by" to see closely related work, or search for author's name and see what else they have written.

 

Attribution

Content by Vancouver Community College Library is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License