Journal articles
Research databases
- JSTORContent in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences.
- Anthropology PlusFrom the late 19th century to the present Anthropology Plus is the world’s most comprehensive, focused index of bibliographic materials from the late 1800s to today in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology; ethnology, archaeology, folklore, and material culture; and interdisciplinary studies. Beyond these disciplines, researchers and scholars in art history, demography, economics, genetics, geography, geology, history, psychology, religion, or sociology will all find relevant anthropological material. It provides access to an extensive, worldwide coverage of core journals plus local and lesser-known journals.
- Informit Complete This link opens in a new windowAustralasian scholarly research for the education, research and business sectors.
This package provides access to the full suite of Informit products, with full text cover-to-cover access to journals, monographs, conference proceedings and other research material.
Tips for bibliographic database searching
- Not all results will be relevant
- We will not have all the articles
- Look beyond the first page of results because unlike Google the results are organised by date order
- Different databases will give you different results so it is best to use more than one
- Use the journal titles to help evaluate the relevance of an article
- Check anthropology and history databases as well as 'archaeology' ones as archaeology is classified under different disciplines in different parts of the world. Art history databases may also be relevant depending on your topic.
Discipline journals
Journal articles are a good source of current information, research and debates from the field as they are often published by research and professional associations in archaeology.
Journals often have themed issues and browsing them will help you make serendipitous or unexpected discoveries.
These are just a few of the key Australian and Pacific journals that you may like to explore:
- Archaeology in OceaniaAccess articles and research reports in prehistoric and historical archaeology. It's primary geographic focus is Australia, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and lands of the western Pacific Rim.
- ArtefactJournal of the Archaeological Society of Victoria.
- Australasian historical archaeologyJournal of the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology.
- Australian archaeologyAustralasian Society for Historical Archaeology.
- AntiquityArticles, review articles and book reviews on all areas of archaeology based in the UK.
- European journal of archaeologyAccess new data and interpretations, debates about the role archaeology plays in society, articles about how archaeology should be organized in a changing Europe, and about the ethics of archaeological practice.
- Journal of archaeological method and theoryAccess articles that address method- or theory-focused issues of current archaeological interest and represent significant explorations of the discipline.
- Journal of archaeological researchAccess recent international research summaries on a broad range of topics and geographical areas.
- Journal of field archaeologyAccess analyses of archaeological data from excavations, surveys, and laboratory research, and those about archaeological heritage and ethics and the history of archaeology, technical as well as methodological studies, and book reviews.
Search strategies & techniques
When you identify your keywords and phrases try to think of alternative words/phrases. For example, television or TV or broadcasting. Also consider spelling variations (American and British) e.g. organization or organisation, globalisation or globalization.
Use AND to combine keywords: sustainability AND development will find all records containing these words anywhere
Use quotation marks for phrases: “environmental sustainability” will find all records containing these words as a phrase
Use OR to find any of these words: planning OR development will find all records containing either of these words
A truncation symbol will finds alternate endings of words, e.g.
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Austral* will find Australia, Australian, Australiana
Use wildcards to compensate for different spellings e.g.
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wom?n will retrieve women and woman
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globali?ation will retrieve globalisation and globalization.
Keyword searching is often difficult, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The English language is rich in synonyms, and there are so many narrower or broader terms which might also be relevant. With chaining or snowball searching, you are searching with concrete search terms (i.e. the title and author of the cited reference).
First, start with a reference that is highly relevant to your research. Ask your supervisor for advice on this if you’re not sure.
You can gather, search, scan and aggregate related references either forwards or backwards in time from this key reference:
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backward chaining: reach into the past to find citations before a particular relevant reference (i.e. in its bibliography/reference list) and add new links to your chain of information.
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forward chaining: look up the reference in Scopus, Web of Science and/or Google Scholar to find articles that have cited it and bring your research from the past to the present.
To search databases effectively, you need to understand the concept of controlled vocabulary.
Many databases use a system of standardised subject terms (sometimes called descriptors or subject headings). Using these terms can help you find information you may otherwise have missed.
When you find a useful reference on a database, look at the full record for that reference to see if there are any descriptors or subject headings in the record. Searching by those terms may yield useful results.
These have been developed and assigned to articles by humans, which means it is a good way to search for concepts and to find similar articles about the same concept. This process takes time, so not every relevant article in a database will have them.