Skip to Main Content

Legal Studies

General resources and information for researching in legal studies.

Articles - what are they?

  • An article is a written piece from a publication such as a journal, magazine or newspaper. 
  • Faculty expect reviewed and edited pieces from a valid publisher. Information on the web from companies or individuals and Wikipedia are usually unacceptable
  • Faculty may require articles of a particular type, i.e. newspaper, popular magazine, or scholarly journal.
  • Access to articles is provided through licensed databases on the library website. These databases collect articles from many publications.
  • Some of the most useful of these databases for your discipline are listed within subject specific guides.  Others are found in our A-Z database list.

Articles - How to Search for Them

1. Try a title or keyword search on your topic.

2. Look for useful "subject" or "descriptor" words.  These will either be in a list on the results page, or you may need to look at a number of individual records.

3. Go back to the search screen and search BY SUBJECT/DESCRIPTOR (not by title/keyword) using the words you discovered in step 2.

4. Be sure to take advantage of:

  • Boolean connectors (AND, OR, NOT)
  • Truncation/Wildcard (educat*)
  • Phrase searching ("childhood obesity")

5. When you find an item you want, use ArticleLinker to get it.

Searching for articles

Search individual databases. Most relevant for this subject are:

Other related databases

Can't find it here?

Submit a request through Interlibrary Loan. We can get the item sent to us from another library, free of charge.

Browse for periodicals