Integrative Studies 400: Explorations in Leadership

Searching Advice

Remember, you need a minimum of 3 peer-reviewed journal articles for your Background Literature Review. You can use other sources (news articles, magazine articles, data, quality websites), but as a supplement, not as a replacement for the journal articles.

While it is tempting to search for journal articles from a local perspective, you are much more likely to find articles if you don't add "Spokane" or a particular place to your search. 

Look for journal articles on the social issue and any specific aspects you want to explore. Journal articles are quite narrowly focused, and they aren't good sources for general information on your social issue.

I would suggest starting with pre-searching on google, to get a sense of some of the issues. Note any specific aspects or solutions. Use keywords for those when looking for journal articles.

Local news stories are a great source for getting a local perspective on your social issue.

Having done some background searching in Google or news sources to get more acquainted with issues in the field, it’s important for you to understand the value of finding academically reliable articles have been reviewed by top academics serving on editorial boards.  Your best way to search for those required peer-reviewed journal articles is through the EWU library, where you log on with you username and password to get full access to the articles themselves.

For Academic Search Ultimate and SocINDEX with Full Text, they allow you to limit your results on the left side. Important limiters:

• Peer-Reviewed Journals -- this will eliminate non-scholarly sources
• Date -- publication date of the article
• Subject -- a human being said the article is about X, versus finding your keywords somewhere in the full record (title/abstract)