Religious Studies: Subject Guide: Find Articles

   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

  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. 

If you come across an article or an essay/book chapter that the library only has in print, you can use our Desktop Delivery service to request an electronic version of the article or book chapter.

This service is currently available to all GSU faculty, students, and staff.* For information about how to place a Desktop Delivery request, click here. 

*Faculty, graduate students, and university administrators can also request electronic copies of materials that we have on microfilm. 

These printable handout provide information on library resources and searching strategies for Religious Studies topics.

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.

The search string in the third box got cut off in the image: it should be lgbt or gay or homosexual or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or queer -- the "ors" mean that you're asking for articles that use any of the terms linked by the "ors"

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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.

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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 have a citation for an article, you can also place an Interlibrary Loan request by starting here and following the prompts).

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.

Use the following databases to locate articles in scholarly journals specific to religious studies topics.

The following multi-discliplinary databases also contain scholarly articles pertinent to research in religious studies.

You may need to search the following non-religious studies subject databases to ensure that you are locating all of the relevant information on your topic. The following are just a few of the many subject-specific databases available to you through the library. To locate additional databases, consult the library's list of Databases by Subject.