College Success: Find & Cite Articles
Video: What are Library Databases and Why do you Need Them?
Find Articles with EBSCO
Find articles in this search of Academic Search Premier and MasterFILE Premier
Other Recommended Databases
- General OneFile
General OneFile is a periodical resource with over 6500 full text titles, many dating back as far as 1980. It contains popular, business and professional journals, NPR audio files complete with transcripts, and Fodor's travel guides. - MasterFILE Premier
EBSCOhost. Full text of general interest periodicals, reference and travel books, biographies, primary source documents, photos, maps, and flags. -
SIRS is a useful tool for getting ideas of topics to research. It includes a PRO/CON section with lots of viewpoints on current issues. Shop for a topic!
- Gale Virtual Reference Library Facts, statistics and explanations to help you understand a topic.
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Gale Virtual Reference Library contains encyclopedia entries that can give you a basic overview of your topic. Look here for basic information about biology, chemistry, nursing and medicine, sociology, history, education, law, and more.
Scholarly? Professional? Popular?
When you have a research assignment, be sure to figure out what types of article sources are required or allowed. Some professors require you to use only scholarly peer-reviewed journals while others might let you use a variety of journals.
Scholarly article: Also known as peer-reviewed, academic, or refereed, these articles are written for researchers and experts and usually share the results of a research study. Scholarly articles are written by experts in the field and are reviewed by expert peers. In many databases, you can limit your search to scholarly, peer-reviewed, or refereed journals to weed out any non-scholarly content. Scholarly article example
Professional/trade article: Written for people working in a specific field. Articles can be written by experts in the field or by staff writers. The articles are only reviewed by journal editors, so they go through a less rigorous review process. Trade article example
Popular journals: Written for a general audience rather than for professionals or scholars, and written by journalists. Examples include The New Yorker, People, and Rolling Stone. Popular article example
Test Your Knowledge: Scholarly, Trade/Professional, Popular
This quick quiz from the Ithaca College Library will test your knowledge and help you learn to tell the difference between different types of journals.
Cite Your Sources in APA
Why cite your sources?
When you use someone else's words, ideas, or images in your writing, you need to give them proper credit. Providing a citation or reference enables others to locate these sources, too! View a sample APA paper to see how citations and formatting are done.
Resources for creating APA-style citations
Free citation creation tools to help you generate APA-style citations:
- MyBib
- Generate citations and bibliographies by pasting a URL or searching for a resource by title
- Covers APA 6 & 7
- Copy and paste citations, download them as a Word doc, save them to Google Drive, print, or email them to yourself
- NCSU Citation Builder
- Simple citation builder for some digital and print materials
- Covers APA 6 & 7
- Copy and paste your generated citation into your bibliography
- Calvin College's Knight Cite
- Build citations for a wide range of resources in print, digital, multimedia, and communication
- Covers APA 7
- Create a free Knight Cite account to save citations and export them to Word or RTF document
Need help with hanging indentation?
- Here is a link to a short video tutorial for hanging indentation formatting in Word.
- Here is a link to a short video tutorial for hanging indentation formatting in Google Drive/Docs
Do you need to cite?
- Alt Text A General Guide to Understanding Written PlagiarismThis is long form alt text for the flow chart "Alt Text A General Guide to Understanding Written Plagiarism"