Guides: Critical Writing Program: Competitive Childhoods 2016-2017: Research Tools

Playing to Win

Why use this guide?

This Critical Writing Program guide will help you to:

Read a citation
Find books and articles using citations and keywords
Choose the best scholarly resources for your topic
Get personalized assistance!

Finding Reviews

These resources will lead you to appropriate book reviews.

EBSCO MegaFILE
General, multidisciplinary periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
Web of Science
Indexes journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Allows for cited reference searching. Includes Science Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Search for specific articles by subject, author, journal, and/or author address, as well as for articles that cite a known author or work.
Google Scholar
Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.

Background Resources

These resources provide contextual information.

Related Library Guides & Collections

Education

Search Aids

Keyword searching
This document suggests a good method of crafting effective keyword searches.

How to Read a Citation

Book citations generally show a publisher, city of publication, and year. Book chapters will include the title of the chapter as well as the name of the book.

• Best, Joel. (2011). Everyone's a winner : life in our congratulatory culture. Berkeley : University of California Press.

Article citations have a journal/periodical title in addition to the article title. They will usually also show a volume and issue number, page numbers, and may show a date, or month or season (e.g., Winter), plus year.

• Ablard, Karen E., and Wayne D. Parker (1997). Parents' Achievement Goals and Perfectionism in Their Academically Talented Children. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 26(6), 651-657.

Using Citations to Find Articles

If you have a complete article citation, search Articles+ to find the full text of your article.

No luck? That doesn't mean we don't have access to the article - it could be in print! Try using the PennText Article Finder as a next step. You can find PennText on the Library homepage.

To find the full-text of an article, enter the journal name into the PennText article finder. A pop-up box will give you options to access the article online, in print, or the option to request through interlibrary loan.

Using Citations to Find Books

If your citation is a book, use Franklin, the Library catalog. Franklin will help you find the library in which the book is located, and the call number.

You can search for a specific book by title, author, or ISBN. You can also do a keyword or subject keyword search to find books on a particular topic.

Other important resources for finding books:

Scholarly Databases

These databases will help you find scholarly articles about your topic

Articles+

Google Scholar
Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.
EBSCO MegaFILE
General, multidisciplinary periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
JSTOR
JSTOR specializes in making available the back issues of journals in a wide variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Issues are available both as images and as text, making searching possible both within each title and across the whole database.
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
Indexing for the international journal article and book literature in anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology. A collaboration of the British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, the International Committee for Social Science Information and Documentation,and UNESCO.
Anthropology PLUS
ACCESS NOTE: 5 users. Combines Anthropological Literature from Harvard University and Anthropological Index from the Royal Anthropological Institute of the UK. Offers worldwide indexing of all core periodicals, in addition to lesser known journals, from the early 19th century to today. Broad geographical coverage emphasizes the Commonwealth and Africa and extends to Eastern Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific. Covers fields of social, cultural, physical, biological and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture and interdisciplinary studies.
ERIC (Education Information Resource Center) - ProQuest
Indexes education-related journal articles and other publications. Cross-file search with other ProQuest databases.
APA PsycInfo
The American Psychological Association's comprehensive indexing and abstracting service for the professional and scholarly literature in psychology and related fields. Coverage is worldwide. Sources are in English and over thirty languages.
Sociological Abstracts
Covers sociology, case work, demographics, policy studies, political science, family studies, feminist studies, and social security programs.

Search for databases by subject

Subject Guide

Joe Holub

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Subjects: French Studies, Italian Studies, Spanish & Portuguese Studies

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Penn Online Research Tutorial

Online guide to working with topics, finding information, and more.

Reference Sources in Print

The sources listed below are print volumes, most shelved in Van Pelt Library Reference Stacks, on the first floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich. The first two are also available online. This is only a sample, of course; try to find more with Franklin keyword searches, such as children encyclopedias

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development by Brian Hopkins (Editor); Ronald G. Barr (As told to); George F. Michel (As told to); Philippe Rochat (As told to)
Call Number: Van Pelt Reference HQ767.9 .C352 2005
ISBN: 0521651174
Publication Date: 2005-09-08
Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society by Paula S. Fass (Editor)
Call Number: Van Pelt Reference HQ767.84 .E53 2003
ISBN: 0028657144
Publication Date: 2003-10-03
Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development by Sam Goldstein (Editor); Jack A. Naglieri (Editor)
Call Number: Van Pelt Reference HQ767.84 .E528 2011
ISBN: 9780387775791
Publication Date: 2010-11-23
Parenthood in America by Lawrence Balter (Editor); Robert B. McCall (Foreword by)
Call Number: Van Pelt Library HQ755.8 .P3783 2000
ISBN: 1576072134
Publication Date: 2000-12-13
The Encyclopedia of Parenting Theory and Research by Charles A. Smith
Call Number: Van Pelt Library HQ755.8 .E523 1999
ISBN: 0313296995
Publication Date: 1999-02-28
The Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence by Jerome Kagan (Editor); Susan Gall (Editor)
Call Number: Van Pelt Reference HQ772 .G27 1998
ISBN: 0810398842
Publication Date: 1997-10-01