COLWRIT 4B: Native Americans and Their Cultures

Search an article database to find citations (title, author, title of journal, date, page numbers) for articles on a particular topic.  The Library gives you access to over 200 article databases covering different disciplines.

1.  Think about which academic disciplines might write about your topic.  Examples:  literature, film, anthropology, history...

2.  Find the appropriate article database by subject (academic discipline or department).  Look for "Recommended" databases.

Library home > Articles > Article Databases by Subject

• Bibliography of Native North Americans
  Indexes books, journal articles, essays, conference papers, and US government documents covering 17 broad regions comprising 290 ethnic groups of native North America. Contains and updates citations from the print counterpart, Ethnographic Bibliography of North America, 1941-1990. Contains more than 80,000 citations. Includes content from the sixteenth century to the present.
  
• Ethnic News Watch
  Indexes over 200 ethnic, minority, and native press publications. Contains news, culture, and history searchable in both English and Spanish. Also includes a retrospective backfile of titles (1960-1989).
  
• Business Source Complete
  Provides full-text for more than 7,400 scholarly business journals and other sources, including nearly 1,100 peer-reviewed business publications. Offers information in nearly every area of business including management, economics, finance, accounting, international business, and more Also includes other sources of full text information such as country economic reports from the EIU, Global Insight, ICON Group and CountryWatch and detailed company profiles for the world's 10,000 largest companies. For guidance on how to search, see Business Source Complete tutorial
  
• ProQuest Social Sciences
  An interdisciplinary metasearch through core indexes in the social sciences including Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, PsycInfo, PAIS, and more.
  

Examples of searches in article databases

Bibliography of Native North Americans:

1.    search for a phrase (2 or more words that must be found together); add alternative terms as needed

* = truncation symbol or wildcard, stands for any number of characters (child* = child, childs, children, childhood, childish...)

indian remain* or nagpra

2.  break your topic into two concepts and put one concept in each horizontal row:

reservation*

casino*

Ethnic NewsWatch

 advanced

3.        aids or hiv

prevention or education

next to ethnic group:  pull down the menu to Native People (this limits articles to those in Native American publications)

4.     too broad; try clicking on one of their suggested terms, such as Human immunodeficiency virus - HIV and Prevention (and remember to limit again to Native People)

• click on the title to see full record (including abstracts and descriptors)
• to limit by publication type (peer-reviewed journals, conferences, books, etc.) click on the appropriate tab or link
• if necessary,look for other limits (latest update, journal articles only, english only) and more advanced searches
• select records to save to your personalized list; lists may be e-mailed, downloaded, printed