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Databases and journals

Search strategies

Library Search is a good place to start. You will be able to find relevant books and videos in our collection, as well as scholarly journal articles and news resources. 

Searching within a database for a particular discipline area will find research more targeted and relevant to your subject. Some general tips for database searching are:

  • Look beyond the first page of results (usually organised by date order)
  • Use more than one – different databases will give you different results
  • Use journal titles to help evaluate the relevance of an article

When you identify your keywords and phrases try to think of alternative words/phrases.  For example, crime or criminology. Also consider spelling variations (American and British) e.g. organization or organisation, globalisation or globalization.

Choose a variety of search terms and experiment with different combinations until the results are relevant to your topic.

  • Use quotation marks for phrases:  “freedom of the press”  will find all records containing these words as a phrase

  • Use OR to combine synonyms or related terms:  “freedom of the press” OR "freedom of media"  will find all records containing either of these phrases

  • Use AND to combine different keywords:  (“freedom of the press” OR "freedom of media") AND responsibilities  will find all records containing these words and phrases

  • Use NOT to exclude words:  animals NOT dogs  will find all records on animals excluding those that mention dogs

  • A truncation symbol * finds alternate endings of words:  journalis*  will find journalist, journalists, journalism, journalistic etc

  • Use wildcards to compensate for different spellings:  wom?n  will retrieve women and woman   globali?ation  will retrieve globalisation and globalization

Symbols used for wildcards and truncation may vary, so use the help guide in each database to find out what is correct.

Keyword searching can sometimes be difficult because the English language is rich in synonyms and there are many narrower or broader terms which might also be relevant. Citation searching or chaining is an alternative way of discovering resources.

Start with an article that is highly relevant to your research. Ask your lecturer or tutor for advice on this if you’re not sure. You can find related articles and resources either forwards or backwards in time from this key reference:

  • Backward chaining: check the article's bibliography or reference list to find citations of previously published resources referred to in this article.
  • Forward chaining: to discover more recently published resources which refer to this article, check the cited by or citations function if available, or look up the reference in Scopus or Google Scholar.

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.

Key resources

Find relevant databases via Library Search by using the Databases tab and browse by Subject area, for example Journalism, Media Studies or Strategic Communication.

Image of Subject area drop down menu on Library home page

 

We recommend you start with the following databases:

Here are several highly ranked academic journals you may wish to search or browse directly. Use BrowZine or the Journal tab in Library Search to discover more journals.

Google Scholar is another tool you can use to discover relevant articles and resources, however it has some limitations to consider:

  • Results vary in quality: Includes some non peer reviewed content and dirty data and it is difficult to screen or filter this
  • Does not provide comprehensive coverage and is often biased towards US content
  • Few options to limit or narrow search results: Cannot search or sort by discipline or format 
  • Searching is imprecise when compared with discipline-specific databases

  • Does not perform as well for older publications and the publications that cite them that have not (yet) been posted on the web