English Composition I - Professor Kennedy: Course Research Guide

Welcome! To get started, check out these instructional videos:

OneSearch

Use OneSearch to locate books, newspaper articles, magazine articles, and academic journal articles.

Sort your search results to the date range (last five years) and by source type to find what you need.

About Academic Journal Articles

Academic journal articles are often identified by:

Confused? 1.5 minute YouTube video from the University of Cincinnati about how to identify an academic article.

This chart will also help you figure out whether you are looking at a magazine article or an academic journal article.

Some (but not all) academic articles undergo a peer-review process. This means that before an article is published, a panel of experts in the field review the article and ensure it has the highest quality.

Find an academic article from the database Academic Search Complete

1. Enter your search terms. In this example, I am interested in articles that discuss the impact of Facebook on the self esteem of college students. If I find too many articles, I may want to focus further, or narrow my search, by adding a fourth search term (example: female). If I don't find any articles, I may want to broaden my search by being less specific (example: instead of searching for Facebook, I can search for social media).
2. Limit your results to FULL TEXT by checking the box.
3. To limit to academic journals, you can check the box for Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) journals.
4. Limit by year (last five years).

Find an academic article from the database Academic OneFile

1. Select "Advanced Search" from the toolbar.
2. Enter your search terms.
3. Limit to FULL TEXT.
4. To limit to academic journals, you can check the box for peer-reviewed publications. 
5. Limit by year (last five years).

About Newspaper Articles

Meant for the general public Many short articles Authors are journalists Advertisements Meant to inform about current events Simple language No references

Find a newspaper article from US Major Dailies

1. Enter your search terms.
2. Check the box next to Limit to: Full Text.
3. Set the publication date for a specific date range.
4. Search.
5. Click on any of the articles on your results screen. Scroll to the very end of the article for a word count (must be longer than 500 words).

Scroll to the end of an article to view the word count.

Not finding what you need in US Major Dailies? Try our other newspaper databases.

Website Evaluation

Citation Help

Librarians from Genesee Community College explain what MLA formatting is and how to put together a citation for a book.

Librarians from Genesee Community College explain how to format MLA8 citations for articles you find in library databases.