*Philosophy: Subject Guide: Find Articles

Session taught by Jill Anderson
on March 12, 2021

Philosophy Librarian Jill Anderson covers:

• Using Advanced Search in Philosopher's Index
• Using Boolean logic (AND, OR, and NOT)
• PhilPapers (in conversation with Eddy Nahmias)
• Introduction to Zotero (begins around :47:00)

  A peer reviewed journal article is an article that has been reviewed and chosen for publication by the author's professional peers. These peers are scholars in the field, who sit on the editorial board of a journal which is usually published by a professional organization or a university press. Peer reviewed articles can also be known as scholarly or refereed articles. 

To see if the GSU Library provides access to a particular periodical (newspaper, magazine, or journal), follow these steps:

• From the library's homepage, select "Journals" from the "Discover" dropdown menu
• Type in the periodical title (see below)

This search will give you more information about our holdings of this journal/magazine/newspaper.

This search does NOT take you directly to individual articles in that periodical, but if a "Full Text Online" result appears, you can click there to search in the journal.

Most databases have an Advanced Search option, which will let you search using multiple terms at once. For example:

An asterisk (*) is a truncation symbol that will bring up results using all the letters leading up to (or following) the * -- so, Islam* will bring up both "Islam" and "Islamic" etc. "Wom*n" will bring up "woman," "women," and "womyn."

* * * * * 

A database's Advanced Search option will also let you limit your search in a number of ways, including:

• Limit by year of publication (helpful if you need the most current scholarship/literature)
• Limit to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles (this is often just a box you can check)
• Limit by language (if you read a particular language or languages, you can select those; you can also limit your search to just items in English)

For example, here are some options that often appear in Advanced Search:

Different subject databases may have other options as well, but most of our databases have these as Advanced Search options.

* * * * *

One box that you SHOULD NOT CHECK is the "Full Text" box. Sounds backwards, I know, but here's why:

Many databases will give you only the citation for a particular article and not the full text.

But! We have lots of databases, and the article that you need may be in a different database.

If you find an article that you want, and it looks like we don't have full text, click the blue "Find It @ GSU" button. That button will point you to the article if it's held in another database, or will help you set up an Interlibrary Loan for the article. 

If you check the "Full Text" box in a database, you're actually saying that you only want articles which that particular database has available in "full text." You're shutting off that "Find It @ GSU" option.

Go to the Library's Databases by Name page to locate databases in other subject areas or disciplines.

You can also used the Databases by Subject dropdown on the library's homepage to sort our databases by discipline/subject area.

If you've got a citation to look up and you're not sure what discipline it falls into, you can try these options, which cover many different disciplines at once:

   to search names as a phrase | ex: "walter cronkite"

   as a wild card | ex: wom*n

AND between words to NARROW results | ex: cat AND dog

OR between words to EXPAND results | ex: cat OR kitten

1. For off-campus access, enter your Campus ID and Password at the prompt.

2. Use the Advanced Search option within the database you are using to achieve the best results.

3. Keep your search terms brief and concise.

4. Check your spelling. Library databases do not correct spelling errors.

5. If your first set of search terms doesn't retrieve any results, try using synonyms that describe your topic.

6. You can search for different forms of a word (different word endings of the same word), by typing the first few letters followed by an asterisk. Example:

• caus* will search for cause, causes, causation, causality, etc.

7. Use double quotation marks around two or more words to search as a phrase. Example:

• “correspondence theory" 

8. Use the connecting words AND and OR to narrow or broaden your search. Examples:

• truth AND falsity - to search for articles that include both terms; narrows your search
• coherence OR correspondence - to search for articles that contain either term; broadents your search

9. You can create more complex searches by using the words AND, OR, NOT, in combination with parentheses. Example:

• Kant AND (lie OR lying OR liar) AND truth

Ask a librarian for help if you can't find what you need!

BrowZine is a service provided by the University Library that lets you browse, monitor, and read scholarly journals in your subject areas. It works by consolidating academic journal articles from GSU Library subscriptions with Open Access collections and organizes them into an easily browsable newsstand format.

The web version is listed in our A-Z database list under "B." You can also download the free app for your mobile devices.<

With BrowZine, you can:

• Sync your settings across devices>
• Browse by title or subject to find journals of interest
• Read the tables of contents of journal issues

If you set up a free personal account, you can also:

• Download articles, share on social media, or export to Zotero, Endnote, etc.
• Customize your personal bookshelf with journals you want to track
• Receive notifications when new articles are published

View an introductory video here: Staying Current with BrowZine For more information about how to download BrowZine, see our BrowZine Research Guide