Why use articles & journals?
Journal articles are much shorter than books, usually only 5-30 pages, which means they have a much narrower focus. Articles cover a focused, niche topic at a highly detailed level. Journals aren't the best place to find contextual or background information, but they are a great source to use to find the most recent academic information about a topic.
Journals contain articles about a shared topic. Articles are written by different authors who may not have anything in common besides their research interest. The highest quality journals require a peer review process where other scholars in the disciple review each others work to verify the rigor of the research before publication.
How to find articles
- BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window
BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
You can find journal articles in BU Libraries Search and other library databases. BULS is a great place to start because it searches across the journals and databases that BU subscribes to, so you can search in multiple repositories of knowledge all at once! To search only for articles, select the articles option when searching your keywords in the BULS search box.
Interdisciplinary Databases
- Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Premier contains indexing, abstracts and full-text articles for scholarly publications, most of them peer-reviewed. The subjects covered include topics in the social sciences, humanities, general science, education and most areas of academic study.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
This database provides full text access to the back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Book reviews are included as well as journal articles. Abstracts are available for some of the articles.
Arts & Humanities Databases
- America: History & Life This link opens in a new window
Covers the history and culture of the U.S. and Canada from prehistory to present times; indexes journal articles, book titles and chapters, reviews from numerous multilingual sources; all abstracts in English.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Includes citations from worldwide publications: periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
- Screen Studies Collection This link opens in a new window
Screen Studies Collection brings the Film Periodicals Database, Film Index International, and the AFI Catalog together in one site.
- Literature Online This link opens in a new window
LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
Social Sciences Databases
- Communication & Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
CMMC indexes journals covering communication, mass media, linguistics, discourse, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication theory, language, logic, organizational communication and other closely related fields of study.
- LGBTQ+ Source This link opens in a new windowThis database provides scholarly and popular LGBTQ+ publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including monographs, magazines and newspapers. It also includes a specialized thesaurus containing thousands of terms relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Sociological Abstracts indexes and abstracts the international literature of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews. It also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Forty percent of the content is published outside of North America.
- Politics Collection This link opens in a new window
This collection, which includes PAIS Index, Policy File Index, Political Science Database, and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, provides abstracts, indexing and full text of journal articles, country reports, dissertations, think-tank reports, working papers, government documents and more, including full-text from many leading political science and international relations journals.
