CMJ 324: Interpersonal Communication

You can search for both books and articles in LibrarySearch, and there are filters, such as peer review for articles, that you can use. Once you've entered a search, sign in with your maine.edu credentials for the most access to full text.

Take a look at our LibrarySearch tutorial to get acquainted with this new system!

There are a number of places to search for scholarly journal articles, and your topic will influence what tool you use.  While you can use the filter for peer reviewed articles in LibrarySearch, there can be benefits to using tailored library databases, which group articles in similar fields. Here are three library databases that might be helpful.  In each, you have the option to choose Advanced Search, which allows you to combine topics in your search.  I also link Google Scholar here, a tool that covers a wide array of subjects.  

In the databases:

• Use Boolean terms to craft your searches
• Immigrant Communities AND Somalis
• Use controlled vocabulary (subject headings)
  • The databases have controlled vocabulary (called Subject Headings) assigned by the database editors to each article.  Once you identify a subject heading, it can help narrow your search results.

In Google Scholar:

• Make sure you are registered through Fogler LIbrary
• Use AND to connect concepts (in capital letters)
• Put quotes around phrases

Here are the formats for APA 7th edition journal article citations:

Reference list format:

Author last name, First name initial. Middle initial. (Year). Title of article: Subtitle of article. Journal Title, volume(issue), pages. doi

Example:

Francis, D. B., Zelaya, C. M., Fortune, D. A., & Noar, S. M. (2021). Black college women’s interpersonal communication in response to a sexual health intervention: A mixed methods study. Health Communication, 36(2), 217–225. https://doi-org/10.1080/10410236.2019.1673949

Warning:

You are often able to grab pre-made citations through the databases and Google Scholar.  Be aware that there are often errors in these citations.  For example, I grabbed the above citation from Google Scholar, and I had to fix both the title and the doi to make the citation correct.

Many of us already use Google when searching for information. But there are ways to navigate Google that make our searching more focused and our results more relevant. Spend some time playing around with some of the Google hacks below to see what you can find on your research topic.

There are many ways to strategically search Google, in order to conduct more complex searches and focus your results. 

• site:.org tells Google that you only want results from organization websites. You can also use site:.edu, or other relevant domains (for instance, site:.gov if you're interested in government information) and you can also search within specific sites for your topic, such as  site:ted.com/talks.

• intitle: refers to any terms you want to ensure are in the title of the web page itself. This often produces a more relevant set of results.

• quotation marks around "climate change" hold those words together so that Google searches for that exact phrase (rather than a search that returns the word climate or the word change).

• ~coast tells the search that you want terms related to the word right after the tilde (~); for coast, this might include terms like coastal, coastline, waterfront, shoreline, and seaside.

• minus sign in front of Alaska tells the search to exclude Alaska-related terms from your results; if there are places, topics, or issues that aren't relevant to your particular topic, you can exclude them this way, so that you have a more focused set of search results.

• The date limiter can be found in the Tools section of your Google search (the Tools section is linked directly below and to the right of the search bar after you run a search).