Research Guides: WRIT 150: Education and Intellectual Development: Scholarly Sources

Locating Scholarly Articles

Peer reviewed research is considered the most authoritative evidence-based information source in the social sciences. This video (3 minutes) explains what scholarly literature is, the peer review process, and how to identify peer reviewed research.

Basic Search

Conduct a basic search in USC Libraries Catalog and Search using the default "Everything" field with search string "cell phones" AND "high school" AND teen* AND learning. View the results in the catalog via this permalink or see the screenshots below.

Everything Search Results View

The "Everything" search results will arrange items by the categories "Articles", "Books", "Databases", and "Journals". In each category you can click on "See All Results" to view the items or refine the search results.

Everything results page presents results in their respective categories. Each category offers a see all results option.

Results List

On the article results page you can refine your search by selecting peer reviewed items, publication date, subject, and more options on the left hand side. The center of pages lists the articles that were retrieved by your keyword search. Click on the hyperlinked article title or "Available Online" link to access the item record.

Refine search results with the filters on the left side of the results page or view the list of articles in the center of the page. Click the title or available online to access the item record.

Retrieve the Article

To read the article, click on the "Available Online" option or navigate to "View Online" to access the article in a database.

The following databases are great places to look for articles for WRIT 150: Education and Intellectual Development. Use the peer review limiter feature on the left hand side of the results pages to find peer reviewed sources.

ProQuest Research Library This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Research Library is a multi-disciplinary index suitable for both undergraduates and graduate students.
It covers dozens of subject areas and indexes thousands of general and scholarly titles and provides full-text for a significant number of the articles included. It is an excellent starting place for research for a paper, particularly if one isn't sure where to begin their research.
ERIC (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
This database contains information on published and unpublished sources on thousands of educational topics. Updated monthly.
ProQuest Education Database This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Education Journals gives users access to over 900 top educational publications, including more than 600 of the titles in full text.
The coverage spans the literature on primary, secondary and higher education as well as special education, home schooling and adult education. Many titles are indexed in the ERIC database.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A growing full text collection of core social science, humanities, and science journals and books.

Search Like Pro

Boolean Operators

Learn how to use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to maximize your search (video, 2 minutes).

Truncation

* - The asterisk replaces an infinite number of letters following a root word. Use the truncation character at the beginning (left-hand truncation), the end (right-hand truncation), or in the middle of search terms.

teen* = teen, teenage, teenager

Phrase Searching

To search for a phrase, put the phrase in quotes “ ” to retrieve terms together. If quotation marks are not used around a phrase the database may return results that split the terms up across the text. For example search for "high school" if you want to treat those words as a concept.

Source: ProQuest Search Syntax