Your topic will determine which are the best subject databases for you. For example, if you are doing a study on gun violence on college campuses, you would use the databases listed under Education (for journals talking about higher education) and Criminal Justice (for journals that discuss crime and gun violence).
Do you have a citation or the title of a specific article you are looking for?
Simply put the article title in this OneSearch box to find it!
UCCS students and faculty have access to RefWorks. You can set up an account with your UCCS email address.
The guide linked below describes how to use RefWorks in more detail:
Can't find your journal article at UCCS? Use Interlibrary Loan!
Sign in with your UCCS username and password to request the article be delivered to you as a PDF.
This usually takes a few days or less.
The databases you use will depend on your topic. The following links are popular databases in the areas of sociology and criminal justice.
General databases cover a wide range of topics and should include your topic.
Includes current and retrospective bibliographic information, author abstracts, and cited references found within the world's leading scholarly social sciences journals covering more than 50 disciplines. Hosted on the Web of Knowledge/Web of Science Platform.
More databases are listed on the General Database page.
Are you wondering if the article you found is scholarly? Ask youself these questions:
Is this an article that was published in a journal? (Hint: Look near the bottom or top of the page for a journal name, volume number, issue number, year and page numbers.)
Does the article tell you where the author works (and maybe their contact details)? (Hint: Look for footnotes by the author's name.)
Is there an abstract at the beginning of the article? (A summary of the article, written by the authors.)
Does the article end with a bibliography or list of works cited? (There could also be extensive footnotes.)
Is the language in the article more technical than a typical magazine or newspaper?
Does the article's formatting look really boring? (No advertisements or glossy color pictures.)
If you answered YES to most of these questions, the article you're looking at is probably scholarly!