AAS 3980: African American Research Methods (Dixon/Fall 2016): Secondary Sources: Articles

See the GSU Library's research guide Literature Reviews for detailed information about researching and writing a literature review.

Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Caro Wallis

Looking for articles based on empirical research? Check out this research guide to get started.

Many databases give you only a citation telling you where to find the article, not the article itself.

There's often a shortcut to the full article text in another database: click the Find It @GSU button to open a window with links to the article you need.

If that fails, try searching for the journal title in GIL-Find, or use Interlibrary Loan (ILL) to request it from another library.

Lost? Stuck? Too many options? Ask a Librarian for help!

Links are to electronic editions; in some cases, older versions are also available in print, as noted.

GSU students, faculty, and staff can use the Desktop Delivery option to get an electronic version of an article in a print-only journal.

Not all of these journals have current subscriptions; if you need a more current article that is not included in our holdings, you can always place an Interlibrary Loan request for the article. 

To limit your searches to topics focusing specifically on African-Americans, African-American culture, etc., use a database's Advanced Search option. Use the search boxes for keywords/search terms based on your topic. In one of the boxes, include a search (called a "search string") like this one:

african-american* OR black* OR negr*

Why?

• The asterisk (*) is a truncation symbol. It means you're searching for that term and any other terms with that term as a stem. So, "black*" will turn up both "black" and "blacks," and "negro" will turn up "negro" or "negroes" (note also that if you were searching for négritude as well, you could also truncate to negr*)
• Depending on their time period and the topics covered, an article, a book, or a database may use "black" and "African-American" interchangeably. Or not: in the library's online book catalog, "Black" refers to people of African origin but not necessarily identifying as Americans.
• If you are working on a historical topic, older articles may use the term "negro" or "negroes." The Journal of African American History changed its name from Journal of Negro History in 2002. Also, if you are searching in historical newspaper databases like the New York Times or the Atlanta Daily World, for example, you'll need to use the words that would have been used at the time, both for searching headlines and for searching full-text.

A search string like this one covers all of those bases. The OR between terms means that you are searching for results including EITHER of the terms in that list. If you used AND instead of OR in that search string, you would only turn up results that used ALL THREE of those terms, which will be a much smaller results list).

If you wanted to limit your results to "women" (or "men" or "children" or "nurses," and so on), you can add another search box (look for a plus sign by the search boxes or an "Add a Row" option) and type that term into an additional search box.

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