LibGuides: Library Resources for History: Finding Articles (SecondarySources)

Why use periodical articles?

Articles that appear in periodicals--such as newspapers, magazines, or scholarly journals--are good resources to use in your research. You can use periodical articles to support an argument, to explain a topic, or to provide additional perspectives on an issue.

Why do I have to use a database to find an article?

The library subscribes to databases to provide access to periodical articles. The content contained in these databases are typically not freely available on the internet. You have to pay to get access to them. But with an article database, the library is paying for that access for you. That's why you have to go through the database to get the articles.

Don't ever pay to download an article from the internet--talk to a librarian, and we can more than likely get you a copy of the article at no charge to you. That's what libraries do!

Databases

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Includes articles from publications representing a wide range of disciplines, including history, with emphasis on scholarly materials. Provides citations and often the full article.
America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
Provides access to abstracts, and citations of numerous journals covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present.
American Periodicals Series Online This link opens in a new window
Includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century.
British Periodicals Online This link opens in a new window
Provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth.
Indiana Magazine of History This link opens in a new window
Features peer-reviewed articles, research notes, annotated primary documents, reviews, and critical essays that contribute to public and scholarly understanding of midwestern and Indiana history.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Searchable full text backfiles of over 200 scholarly journals in various disciplines, including history.
Military and Government Collection This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text articles from over 400 publications which cover military and government issues.
Project MUSE - Research Collection This link opens in a new window
Provides access to over 350 high quality humanities and social sciences journals from over 60 scholarly publishers.
Video user guides for Project Muse are available: http://youtu.be/Bhldo-sLktk

My database search only gave me a citation. Now what?

While many databases contain the full-text of the article right there, sometimes this won't happen. You may conduct a search and get results that only give you an citation and an abstract. So how do you get from the citation to actually getting the article?

Here's where IUCAT comes in. IUCAT is the library catalog, and it tells you what books we own and what journals we subscribe to. You can conduct a Periodical Title Search in IUCAT to find out what the library's holdings are for any journal. You will search for the journal title, not the name of the article, because all IUCAT knows is whether we have the journal or not. It doesn't know what's contained in the journal.

If you cannot locate the journal you want in IUCAT, or if library's holdings do not include the specific issue you need, you can submit an Interlibrary Loan request for the article. We will ask another library that does have that specific issue to make a copy of the article and send it here for you in PDF format.

IUCAT This link opens in a new window
Searches for books, journals, DVDs, government documents and more available at IUS and all other IU campuses. (You can request that books from other IU campuses be delivered to the IUS Library. Ask at the reference desk if you have any questions!)

Interlibrary Loan