LibGuides: Communication and Culture: Journal Articles

Journal Articles - Primary Sources

Indexes and Databases bring together a number of different online journals and other resources into one search engine. Use these tools to find citations, abstracts and/or full text articles, reports and other resources on your topic. Both scholarly and popular articles may be included.

ABI/Inform Global
Incorporates management, industry and company-specific information, both practical and theoretical. Subjects include telecommunications, marketing, public administration, competitive strategies, and product information.
Communication Source
Merges Communication and Mass Media Complete with Communication Abstracts. Comprehensive international source for communication, media studies, linguistics, and radio and broadcast journalism.
Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive
"Archival research resource containing the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000." Includes Variety (1905-2000), Billboard (1894-2000), Broadcasting (1931-2000), Picturegoer (1911-1960) and American Film (1975-1992).
Public Affairs Information Services (PAIS)
Indexes scholarly articles, books, government publications, websites, conference papers, and reports from public, intergovernmental and private organizations. Useful source for communication and public policy.
Screen Studies Collection
A gateway to three unique resources: the American Film Institute Catalog, Film Index International, and the International Index to Film Periodicals. The first two resources are encyclopedic compilations of film titles and the individuals associated with their making. Each entry includes references to film reviews. The third resource is an index to the articles found in journals held by members of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and is an excellent source for scholarly content on world cinema.
Sociological Abstracts
Provides access to sociology and related disciplines, both theoretical and applied. Topics include anthropology, economics, education, medicine, community development, philosophy, demography, political science and social psychology.

Journal Articles - Secondary Sources

Alternative Press Index
Indexes more than 300 left wing journals and magazines on topics relating to social change. Relevant subject headings include media bias, community media and media activism. Coverage is from 1991 onwards.
Canadian Periodicals Index
Covers academic journals, popular magazines, and newspapers, in French and English. Putting broad terms in the Subject Search Guide identifies CPI's equivalent vocabulary. Search results can be filtered with suggested options.
Google Scholar
A subset of regular Google that covers a broad range of scholarly information sources. Under the advanced scholar search option, select the collections limiter, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. Under scholar preference, set the library link to York University Libraries (identifies YUL items among the results).
JSTOR
A not-for-profit service designed to support academic research, JSTOR is a multidisciplinary full-text collection of journals. Keyword searching can be done across the entire collection or by specific discipline. Linguistics is the closest discipline match to communications.
Music Index
Covers the popular and classical music industries drawing on a variety of journals and magazines. Includes articles, book reviews, obituaries, and news. Try subject headings like popular culture or mass media in combination with names of musical styles or performers.
Performing Arts
Indexes film, television, theatre and dance articles from academic and popular journals. Taking advantage of the autocomplete function in the advance keyword search provides quick access to the appropriate communication and media terminology and relevant content.
Women's Studies International
A comprehensive index that covers various subjects, including the arts, and describe the literature found in journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, theses, dissertations, NGO studies, web sites and web documents. For media, search under phrases like women in mass media or gender stereotypes or media effects.

Journal Articles - French

Use these indexes and databases to find journal articles in French. Both scholaraly and popular articles may be included.

Erudit
A Quebec initiative developed by a consortium of universities, Laval, Montreal and Quebec, this bilingual resource is designed to promote and disseminate university research in the human, social and natural sciences. The original collection has grown substantially as a result of agreements with more than 50 Canadian and French publishers.
Francis
FRANCIS is a multidisciplinary resource in the humanities and social sciences created by the Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (INIST-CNRS) in Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy (France). Search descriptors are in English and French. Content is strong for sociology and so combine phrases like media and politics, or media and television with social issues.
Repère
French-language content is drawn from 645 academic and general interest journals and magazines published in Francophone countries. Starting the search with the general subject terms like radio, presse, or television reveals all the subheadings, including country of origin.

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Online Tutorials

Search Tips

When searching online, various words are used to help broaden or narrow your search. Here are a few tips you should know before searching any academic database:

Boolean operators: Most internet and electronic databases follow the rules of boolean logic. Boolean logic refers to the relationships (connections or differences) between different search terms. The most common boolean operators are:

AND - used to narrow a search and establish more relevant results by linking keywords together (e.g. "behavioural" and "psychology").

OR - broadens a search and get more results. Typically used for synonyms and words with variant spellings (e.g. "self-actualization" and "self-identity").

NOT - use to narrow a search and get more relevant results (e.g. "behaviouralism" not "humanism").

Truncation: used to find similar words with different endings

e.g. human* searches "human and humans"

e.g. educat* searches "education", "educate", "educational" etc

asterisk (*) searches for various different endings of a word in most databases (including York University), however LexisNexis uses an exlamation mark (!).

Other Tips

Advanced Search - this option is available on most databases, and allows you to specialize your search based on documents (books, articles, video etc), date, geographic location, language, etc.

Quotation Marks - using quotation marks will allow you to search for exact phrases. For example, searching "mental impairment" will only retreive searches with both "mental" and "impairment" together in that order.

Refine Search - many online databases allow you to specify your search criteria after selecting your keywords and clicking on search.

Finding a Specific Journal - if you know the name of the journal you are looking for, type it in the Omni search box.