Finding Articles - HIST 389W - History Matters III: Senior Research Project - James P. Adams Library at James P. Adams Library

Articles in Databases

Before you search the databases, make sure that you've listed the key concepts and ideas in your research question. Create a list of any synonyms for those concepts: Are there other terms or names in common use? What about more specific phrases? Read each set of results carefully as a group of short documents. Look for new concepts, named persons, named events, organizations, etc. that could be used to adjust your search.

Suggested History Databases

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Indexes and abstracts over 11,000 magazines and scholarly journals in all subject areas with over 7,000 in full text. Coverage dates vary.
America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
A complete bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Published since 1964, the database comprises over 490,000 bibliographic entries for periodicals dating back to 1954, providing a research tool for students and researchers of US and Canadian history.
Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Historical Abstracts covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. This authoritative database provides indexing of more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955. ACCESS LIMITED TO 6 SIMULTANEOUS USERS.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
RIC currently participates in all 15 JSTOR Arts & Sciences archive collections and the Life Sciences archive collection. Journals in archive collections are always included from volume 1 number 1, and related prior titles, but stop short of current issues. RIC also subscribes to 34 current journals in JSTOR. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature. Set up "Library Links" to discover Adams Library materials.

Does RIC own this journal?

To look for a specific periodical whose title you know (e.g. Journal of World History) , click on the Journals by Title link on the Library home page. A search for the journal, Journal of World History, for example, indicates what years (issues) are owned by Adams Library and in what format: print or electronic.

Journal by Title
The Journals by Title Search allows users to search for specific journals which are accessible to RIC's users. Full text and format availability for the item within each collection is listed along with publication information and coverage.
Journal of World History
Search by journal title example.

InterLibrary Loan Help

When you find a relevant citation, click on "Check the RIC library" to open another window which will indicate if the library has access to the journal and in what format (print or online or some of each for different spans of years). If the next display does not contain a link to the journal title or to full text, then use the "Request this item" link to request through InterLibrary Loan (ILL). Remember: requests for articles held in Rhode Island will require a minimum of 5 - 7 days; those outside RI will require longer.

Need help with InterLibrary Loan? Find instructions here!

Interlibrary Loan