Guides: COM 356: Find Sources

students reading in front of periodical display

Also known as scholarly articles, peer-reviewed articles are sources that are:

written by experts in the field
reviewed by other experts in the field (hence the peer-reviewed)
intended for an academic audience

While you can find peer-reviewed articles through general search engines, databases contain a feature where you can narrow your results to only peer-reviewed articles.

Find Subject-Specific Articles:

Communication & Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
Supports quality research in areas related to communication and mass media. This includes both CommSearch and Mass Media Articles Index, along with journals in communication, mass media, and closely-related fields of study. Contains indexing and abstracting for more than 570 journals and full text access to over 450 journals.
OneFile: Communications and Mass Media This link opens in a new window
Search over 400 Gale Academic OneFile journals for information focused on the communications field – advertising, public relations, linguistics and literature.
Formerly called Communications and Mass Media Collection
Newspaper Source This link opens in a new window
Newspaper Source does not provide access to peer-reviewed sources, but it allows you to search content from hundreds of US, international and regional newspapers.

Find Articles in Multidisciplinary Databases:

Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Ultimate offers access to resources cited in key subject indexes. The combination of academic journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos meets the needs of scholars in virtually every discipline ranging from astronomy, anthropology, biomedicine, engineering, health, law and literacy to mathematics, pharmacology, women’s studies, zoology and more.
Academic OneFile This link opens in a new window
Provides millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources—including thousands of podcasts and transcripts from NPR and CNN as well as videos from BBC Worldwide Learning. Includes extensive coverage in key subject areas such as biology, chemistry, economics, environmental science, history, marketing, political science, and psychology.

Talkwalker
Search for one project and narrow by sentiment and simple demographic information.
Google Trends
Search terms to see a history of when they were trending, where they were trending, and associated terms.

Statista This link opens in a new window
Statistics portal integrating statistics and other quantitative data on over 80,000 topics including media, business, finance, politics, and more.
Sage Data This link opens in a new window
Provides access to billions of statistical datasets across 16 topical areas, including Business, Education, Health, Criminal Justice and Law.

Student thumbing through a book in front of library stacks

Books and eBooks often provide a broader overview and cover more information than a scholarly journal article.

You don't need to read an entire book to use it in your research. Use the index at the back of a book to find the information you need.

To find books and eBooks, you can either:

Search the NOBLE catalog

NOBLE Catalog Search
Search the Jenks Library catalog for books, eBooks, audiobooks, scores, etc.

Browse the stacks for a book related to your topic

If you find an article or book that you can't access, don't pay for it! Instead, submit an Interlibrary Loan request, and you'll receive articles within a few days!

Interlibrary Loan: Article & Book Request
Can't find the article or book you're looking for at Gordon? Fill out the Interlibrary Loan request form and we'll track the article or book down for you!

Are you looking for a specific article, like an article that you found referenced in a bibliography? Search for the journal in Journal Finder, linked below:

Browse Journal Finder
Find individual journals and search within specific publications.

Forming your Search String

The more complicated your question, the less likely a search engine can understand it. To get the best result, identify keywords and like terms to create a search string.

Example research question: How have modern tv comedies portrayed the afterlife?

Keywords: Modern tv comedies, afterlife

Like terms can include synonyms and also examples of your keywords. If you don't get results from searching your keywords, it doesn't mean that the research doesn't exist. It could mean that the researcher used different language to describe the same topic

Modern tv comedies: television comedies, sitcoms, comedy show
afterlife: life after death, heaven, hell, the good place

Search strings connect your keywords and like terms together for the best results.

Too many results? Use AND to narrow results

modern tv comedies AND afterlife

Too few results? Use OR to broaden results

modern tv comedies OR comedy show OR television comedy AND afterlife OR "life after death" OR heaven