America: History & Life is the standard database for scholarly articles in North American history. It covers all historical periods and indexes articles appearing in over 1,700 journals.
See the Searching for Articles in America: History & Life box and the More Search Tips for America: History & Life box for advice on searching.
For other potential databases to search, see the Other Article Databases box.
Before you begin searching, you can limit your search to articles that cover the 1950s. One of the Search Options on the lower part of the screen, on the right, is Historical Period.
Searching America: History & Life in a nutshell:
- To the left of the search boxes, you see Select a Field. If you don't select a "field", if you stick with the default, you search all the words in the records of the articles in the database, the author field, title field, subject headings, article abstracts, etc.
- There are three rows of search boxes, but you can add more by clicking the plus icon to the right of the last search box. The boxes are connected with AND. Searching with AND means that all of the words you search have to appear together in a record. The more rows, the more ANDs you use, the more specific your search becomes.
--- "african american" and "korean war" is a broader search, will pull up more articles, than: "african american" and "korean war" and navy
- You can combine words within a search box with OR. The more ORs you use, the broader you search becomes, because the database will retrieve articles than contain any of those words.
--- women or female or gender in a search box will make your search broader, retrieve more articles, than simply women
- In America: History & Life, and in most other article databases, * is the "wildcard." Use this to search for forms of words. For example, politic* will retrieve records of articles that contain politcs or political or politician or politicians, etc. Using a wildcard broadens your search.
Once you have an initial search result, you have options for improving you search, revising to make the result more relevant to your research.
Check out the search limits on the left. Most databases, for example, will let you limit to scholarly articles. Limiting to a subject heading relevant to your topic can also be an effective search strategy. If you're not happy with the results after choosing a limit, just click the X next to the limit on the left to remove it. Don't use the Full Text limit: there are ways to easily access the full text of an article if it's not available in America: History & Life. See the Getting the Full Text box.
Once you have an initial search result, browse through the results, especially the abstracts of the articles, to identify those relevant to your topic. Pay particular attention to the subject headings. You can use a subject heading or subject headings to give your search more focus, specificity. You can either add the subject to your initial search or use the subject to replace one of the words you search in the initial search. In either case, in the drop-down to the right of the search box, select SU Subject terms. Remember to use "double quotes" to search for a phrase.
Most of the records of the articles you find in America: History & Life and other databases will have a direct link to the full text. If not, click on "Get It @ R." "Get It @ R" searches for and tries to link to full ltext outside of the database. It works in most cases. If it doesn't, you'll go to a Rutgers page with a Sign In ink. Click that. Once you've log in with NetID, you'll see an Article Delivery tab. Click that to auto-populate an article request form, then click Submit.
Usually in less than twenty-four hours, you'll get an email telling you that your article is available, with directions to access a PDF.
Click Email Me, below the Your Footnotes, Bibliography tab, if you have any trouble access the full text of an article.
These may be useful as well-
Academic Search Premier: Multidisciplinary
Anthropology Plus: Anthropology
Art Full Text: Art
ATLA : Religion
EconLit: Economics
ERIC: Education
Historical Abstracts: Non-US history
Historical Statistics of the United States
Medline: Medicine
MLA Bibliography: Literature
PAIS: Public Policy (indexing back to 1915)
PsychInfo: Psychology
Sociological Abstracts: Sociology
Women Studies International: Women's, Gender Studies
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts: Political Science
JSTOR: a very useful database because it has excellent chronological coverage, back to the first volume of all of the journals indexed. Also let's you search for terms in fulltext, which is sometimes useful. But JSTOR does not have current articles and only indexes fewer than 200 journals in American history. Yes, all of the articles are available in fulltext, but "Get It @ R" will link from America: History and Life (or any other database) to fulltext in JSTOR. Why limit your search to articles in such a small number of journals? Why not search for current scholarship?
For a full list of all the databases, go to the Indexes and Databases page. For databases of primary sources in North American history, click the "Find Primary Resources" tab above.
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