Guides: WRIT030-601-2019: Introduction to Critical Writing: Research Tools

Scholarly Databases

These databases will help you find scholarly articles about your topic

Articles+
Articles+ searches through many of our Penn-subscribed journals, and brings you results all in one place.

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.

Penn's subscription currently includes all the available collections:
- the Arts & Sciences Collection I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and the Complement
- the Business II & III Collection
- the Biological Sciences Collection
- the Health & General Science Collection
- the Language and Literature Collection
- the Music Collection
- the 19th Century British Pamphlets
Access to journals from JSTOR is restricted to current Penn faculty, staff and students.

Printing from the JSTOR database requires downloading a helper application called JPrint.

Search for databases by subject

PubMed
NLM's public access version to Medline, the premier database for biomedical literature.
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.
CogNet
A "central repository for the most current and topical electronic resources" in cognitive science and its six core areas: philosophy of mind, computational intelligence, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive anthropology.
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.
Philosopher's Index
Provides indexing and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy and related fields. It covers the areas of ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of mind as well as material on the philosophy of law, religion, science, history, language and education.

Finding 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.

Off-campus Access

Visit this library guide for more information on using Penn Libraries' resources off-campus.

If' you're off-campus and want to connect to a Penn subscription to a website (for example, Nature), you can use this prepend before the site:

https://proxy.library.upenn.edu/login?url=

You'll then be asked to log in with your PennKey and password. You can also add this link as a bookmark in your browser.

Note that Penn sometimes does not subscribe to a journal website but still has content available through another electronic subscription. In that case, try a journal title keyword search in Franklin, or feel free to get in touch.

Finding 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.

Resources for locating books:

Book not at Penn? Request it from another library using BorrowDirect or EZ-Borrow!

Reading a Citation

Article citations have a journal/periodical title in addition to the article title. They will usually also show a volume and issue number.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218.
.

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

Peterson, C. (2013). Pursuing the good life: 100 reflections on positive psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Background Resources

These resources provide contextual information.

Routledge Dictionary of Philosophy by Proudfoot; Lacey; A. R. Lacey; Michael Proudfoot
Call Number: B41 .L32 2010
ISBN: 9780415356442
Publication Date: 2009-12-03

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Penn Libraries

There are lots of resources available on the Penn Libraries homepage.

Alumni Services

As a Penn alum, you'll continue to have access to some library resources.

Penn Libraries Alumni Services

Subject Guide

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