HIST 7B: History of the United States, From the Civil War to the Present (Livie)

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"It's all free on the Internet, right? Why should I go through the library's website to find sources for my paper?"

The Web is a great source for free, publicly available information. However, the Library pays for thousands of electronic books, journals, and other information resources that are available only to the campus community. Through the Library website, you can access hundreds of different licensed databases containing journal articles, electronic books, maps, images, government and legal information, current and historical newspapers, digitized primary sources, and more. 

You access these resources through the Internet, using a browser like Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer -- but these databases are not part of the free, public Web. Resources like Lexis-Nexis, Web of Science, Academic Search Complete, and ARTstor are "invisible" to Google. You will not see results from most library databases in the results of a Google search.

Want to find out more? Get started exploring the Library's electronic resources, or find out how to get access to licensed resources from off-campus.

Looking for a location or call number in Doe, Main Stacks or Moffitt?  Try the floorplans, or ask for assistance!

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The UC Berkeley History Collection News blog will keep you informed of new digital collections, trials of resources, workshops, events related to History collections, and other news of interest to researchers in History. Options for accessing the blog include:

• Visiting the blog  (I post a few times a week)
• Subscribing to the RSS feed for the blog
• Following me on Twitter at @ucbhistorylib where I tweet links to the blog posts

Articles are published in scholarly journals, newspapers and popular magazines. Think about the type of information you need for your paper, who would write about your topic and where those articles would be published. This will save you time by ensuring that you begin your research in the right place.

Example:
Female college students with eating disorders.

Who would write about this topic?

A. Psychologists, health/medical researchers

B. Writers for women’s magazines or news magazines

Where would they publish?

A. Scholarly psychology or health/medical journals

B. Popular magazines

Your instructor may want you to use "peer reviewed" articles as sources for your paper. Or you may be asked to find "academic," "scholarly," or "refereed" articles. What do these terms mean?

Let's start with the terms academic and scholarly, which are synonyms. An academic or scholarly journal is one intended for a specialized or expert audience. Journals like this exist in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Examples include Nature, Journal of Sociology, and Journal of American Studies. Scholarly/academic journals exist to help scholars communicate their latest research and ideas to each other; they are written "by experts for experts."

Most scholarly/academic journals are peer reviewed; another synonym for peer reviewed is refereed. Before an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, it's evaluated for quality and significance by several specialists in the same field, who are "peers" of the author. The article may go through several revisions before it finally reaches publication.

Magazines like Time or Scientific American, newspapers, (most) books, government documents, and websites are not peer-reviewed, though they may be thoroughly edited and fact-checked. Articles in scholarly journals (in printed format or online) usually ARE peer-reviewed.

How can you tell if an article is both scholarly and peer-reviewed?

In the article databases and library catalogs, your search strategy should include combining keywords that represent the main concepts of your topic. Take a couple minutes to think about your topic and keywords to use in your searches.

Suppose you're starting with the thesis: “Global warming is having adverse impacts on agriculture in America.” What keywords might be used to search for relevant sources?

Break your question down into its major concept terms:

global warming   |   impacts   |   agriculture   |   America

Think of synonyms and variations of your keywords to use when searching. You should go through this quick exercise because you may find out that while you use the word “global warming,” the database you’re searching uses “climate change.” Using synonyms guarantees that you’re casting a wider net.

Construct a search using your keywords, combining them with AND and OR

•  AND narrows your search by looking for articles with all of the words
•  OR broadens your search by looking for articles with any of the words

Using specialized encyclopedias to become familiar with your topic is the most efficient way to get started on your research. These encyclopedias, written by knowledgeable scholars, will summarize your topic, provide you with social and historical context, familiarize you with specialized terminology, and often provide lists of additional resources on your topic. They are providing you in condensed form information from multiple books and articles. Think of them as CliffsNotes ... that you are allowed to use.

The encyclopedias listed below may be useful for many of the topics suggested by your instructor, but there are many, many more. The easiest way to locate them in the Library is to do an Oskicat search like this:

1. Use the keyword search so that it looks for the words everywhere in the record.
2. The asterisk is a truncation symbol, which will retrieve variations of the word: ethic, ethics, ethical, etc.
3. The Doe Reference collection includes many encyclopedias related to social science topics. Limiting your search to this collection will retrieve a manageable number of records. If you retrieve nothing, change the search parameter to All Collections.

Try different terminology and be persistent. If you are not finding a relevant resource, be sure to ask for help.

Other searches you might try:
encyclopedia and history
encyclopedia and united states
encyclopedia and african american*
encyclopedia and reconstruction

Use OskiCat to locate materials related to your topic, including books, government publications, and  audio and video recordings, in the libraries of UC Berkeley. OskiCat will show you the location and availability of the items that we own.

• Using OskiCat (but not Melvyl) you can also renew your books online, look up course reserve materials by course number or instructor name, and place holds on items that other library users have already checked out.

Use Melvyl to locate materials related to your topic located at other campuses in the UC system, or worldwide. You can use the Request button to request an item from another library, if we don't own it.

• Using Melvyl (but not OskiCat) you can find articles as well as books, easily format a citation for copying into a bibliography, and see images of book covers, when available. Melvyl will also show you the location and availablity of items that we own.

Melvyl has changed as of January 2012, and now includes many more articles.  Detailed Melvyl help.

Google Books contains millions of scanned books, from libraries and publishers worldwide. You can search the entire text of the books, view previews or "snippets" from books that are still in copyright, and read the full text of out-of-copyright (pre-1923) books.  Want to read the entire text of an in-copyright book?  Use Google Books' Find in a Library link to locate the book in a UC Berkeley library, or search OskiCat to see if UC Berkeley owns the book.

Why use Google Books?

Library catalogs (like OskiCat) don't search inside books; using a library catalog, you can search only information about the book (title, author, Library of Congress subject headings, etc.).  Google Books will let you search inside books, which can be very useful for hard-to-find information.  Try it now:

1. Enter terms related to your topic in the search boxes. If you want to specify where in the record your term(s) should be searched, you can select a search field from the optional Select a Field drop-down list.  Select a Boolean operator (AND, OR, NOT) to combine search boxes. AND is the default.
2. Boolean/Phrase searching is the default type of search and is recommended.
3. Choosing the option “linked full text” will only retrieve results that include links to the full text that reside within this database. This is NOT RECOMMENDED, since it doesn’t include the links to full text we provide through UC e-Links and will greatly limit the number of results you retrieve.
4. Some scholarly materials are not peer reviewed so unless you are limiting your search to articles, you might avoid checking this box.
5. This database lists content published since 1964, but you are able to limit your results to works published during certain years.
6. A unique feature of this database is that it also allows you to limit your search results to works about a particular period of time.
7. In addition to articles published in journals, the database includes listings for books, conference papers, disserations, and other scholarly materials.
8. You also have the ability to limit your search to a particular type of work, such as book reviews or dissertations.
9. Much of the content in the database is from English-language publications, but other languages are represented. The language limiter allows you to limit your results to just the languages you can read.

Search tips:

When accommodating variations in spelling, you can use wildcard characters represented by question mark ? or a pound sign #.

Use ? to replace a single character. Example: ne?t to find all citations containing neat, nest or next.

Use # when an alternate spelling may contain an extra character. Example: colo#r to find all citations containing color or colour.

Use the truncation symbol * (asterisk) to look for variant endings of a word. Example: comput* to find the words computer or computing.

Use “quotation marks” to search for an exact phrase.

You can also view a tutorial on Advanced Search in America: History and Life.

• America: History and Life
  Includes bibliographic citations and abstracts on all aspects of U.S. and Canadian history, culture, and current affairs from prehistoric times to the present. The database provides strong English-language journal coverage balanced by an international perspective on various topics and events. It contains abstracts and citations to journal articles, book/media reviews, and dissertations. The database includes scholarly literature published since 1964.
  

Library home > Articles > Article Databases by Subject > H > History > America:  History and Life

mexican*                    (select a field- optional)
immigra*                                        (select a field - optional)
econom*                  (select a field - optional)

historical period from:   1920  to    1940

american identit*                    (select a field- optional)
immigra*                                        (select a field - optional)
assimil*   or     accultural*     (select a field - optional)

historical period from:   1900  to    2000

Watch:  America: History and Life - the Movie! (2 min 34 seconds)

Library home > Articles > General Article Databases > JSTOR

REMEMBER:  JSTOR doesn't include articles from the last 3-5 years!!!

Advanced Search

1.  immigra*

irish

2.  to narrow your search further, add another search term, or try searching for your terms in the titles of the articles:

immigra*   (item title)

irish (item title)

advanced search also allows you to limit to certain years of publication (1980-2000, for example), to specific disciplines (ex:  African American studies) etc.

Many article databases contain information about articles (citations or abstracts), not the entire text of the article.  Once you've used an article database to find articles on your topic, you may need to use this button: in order to locate and read the full text of the article. The UC-eLinks button appears in nearly all the databases available from the UCB Library website.

UC-eLinks will link you to the online full text of an article if UCB has paid for online access; otherwise, UC-eLinks will help you locate a print copy on the shelf in the library. If UCB doesn't own the article in print or online format, UC-eLinks can also help you order a copy from another library.

For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 4 min.)

You can also set up UC-eLinks to work with Google Scholar.  For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 2 min.)

Now that you know the types of articles you need, you can choose a database, also known as a periodical index, to find them. Databases are collections of thousands of articles organized by subject. The Libraries have hundreds of databases covering every academic discipline. Some are multi-disciplinary, covering a broad range of subjects and including popular and scholarly sources, and others are subject-specific, and include scholarly and specialized articles. A complete list is available at Find Articles.

The following multi-disciplinary databases are good places to start your research:

• Academic Search Complete
  A multidisciplinary index to articles in more than 10,900 journals and other publications in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese; full-text is available for over 5300 journals.
  
• Google Scholar
  Lists journal articles, books, preprints, and technical reports in many subject areas (though more specialized article databases may cover any given field more completely). Some listings include links to related articles and to other sources that cite the item. Includes content from free resources (such as ArXiv.org and university websites) as well as subscription resources (such as electronic journals from selected publishers). Use the UC-eLinks option, when available, to find the UCB access to a publication.
  
• JSTOR
  Includes over 1000 scholarly journals with access to more than 2 million articles. JSTOR is an archive which means that current issues (generally the most recent 3-5 years) of the journals are not yet available.
  

Plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty, violating the Berkeley Campus Code of Student Conduct. The campus issues a guide to understanding plagiarism, which states:

"Plagiarism means using another's work without giving credit. You must put others' words in quotation marks and cite your source(s). Citation must also be given when using others' ideas, even when those ideas are paraphrased into your own words."

Plagiarism is a serious violation of academic and student conduct rules and is punishable with a failing grade and possibly more severe action.

In order to avoid plagiarism, you must give credit when

• You use another person's ideas, opinions, or theories.
• You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
• You use quotations from another person's spoken or written word.
• You paraphrase another person's spoken or written word.

This content is part of the Understanding Plagiarism tutorial created by the Indiana University School of Education.

The Chicago Manual of Style includes two slightly different documentation systems: (1) notes and bibliography (NB) and (2) author-date. The notes and bibliography style is preferred by many in literature, history, and the arts.

In the NB system, you mark within your paper where you have cited something by adding a number, which refers to a detailed reference either at the bottom of the page (footnote) or at the end of the paper (endnote). These notes indicate the specific place in your source you are referencing.

The bibliography includes complete information for each item, with the items arranged in alphabetical order by author's last name.

Purdue's Writing Lab provides an example of a paper formatted using Chicago NB style.

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