Introduction
Welcome to the Sociology 101 guide! This resource is used for various Sociology assignments, including the Field Observation & Annotated Bibliography. Check out the video below for a step-by-step walkthrough for finding scholarly sociology articles with the library's primary search tool, Discovery.
If you have questions about your assignments, talk to your instructor. They are the best resource when it comes to what they are looking for when it comes to your assignment.
Library Resources Required
You are required to use library resources to find and use scholarly journal articles. So what does your instructor mean by this? Your instructor wants you to use databases to find reliable and up-to-date information about your topic. Check out the Recommended Resources tab to begin searching.
Find Books
You have access to millions of titles through Locate, our library catalog, and MOBIUS OpenRS, the catalog shared by 60+ libraries across the region. Students often find recently published titles about their topics or use slightly older titles as additional resources. Remember to search for books early, especially if requesting from MOBIUS -- these items have to be sent via courier so they may take a week or so to arrive at our campuses.
Annotated Bibliography
Finding a Sociology Research Study Tutorial
Note: (We recommend maximizing the Tutorial, and selecting the highest resolution from the gear icon at the bottom of the video window)
Databases for Sociology Research
- SocINDEX with Full-Text This link opens in a new windowSocINDEX with Full Text covers a broad range of studies, including gender studies, criminal justice, social psychology, religion, racial studies and social work. In addition to full-text journals, SocINDEX with Full Text contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895. Complete with extensive indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical content sources, the database also includes searchable cited references.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowAcademic Search Complete offers an enormous collection of full-text journals, providing users access to critical information from many sources unique to this database. In addition, it includes peer-reviewed full text for STEM research, as well as for the social sciences and humanities. Scholarly content covers a broad range of important areas of academic study, including anthropology, engineering, law, sciences and more.
Tips and Tricks
Here are some tips to make sure you get scholarly journal articles when searching with Discovery:
- Use the Publication Date slider to limit the date range of your results to between 5-10 years, depending on your instructor's instructions.
- Click the box that says Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals to ensure that your results are scholarly articles.
- Add "soci*" to a search box and change drop down to SO-Journal Title/Source to get journal titles that have soci in them. For example, society, social, sociology, sociological.
If you need a research study specifically, try adding these other search terms:
- Add "study" to a search box and change the dropdown menu to AB-Abstract so that the databases pull articles that mention an actual study in the abstract.
- Add "method" in one search box and "result" in another search box to get articles that have Methods and Results sections.
For an in-depth demonstration of these tips and why they are helpful, check out the video to the left.