Sociology Resources

A journal is a scholarly publication in a specific discipline that is published regularly throughout the year. It contains articles written by researchers and experts.

In the following citation, the journal title is in bold:

Thiessen, Joel, and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme. 2017. “Becoming a Religious None: Irreligious Socialization and Disaffiliation.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(1):64–82. doi: 10.1111/jssr.12319.

You can find out if the library subscribes to a journal in print or online, or if we have back issues, by searching for a title using the Journal Search. For example, searching the journal title above brings you this result:

Clicking the Online Access link will take you directly to the journal, or you can click anywhere else in the result box to go into the record where you can see more details about the title.

The library has:

• Full text availability online through multiple databases (note the coverage dates are different for some of them)

Peer review is a process in which a scholar's research is critically evaluated by other experts in that subject area before being published in a journal.

The terms scholarly and academic may also be used to refer to articles that go through the peer review process.

Many databases offer the option to search for peer-reviewed journal articles; we'll show you how to do this in the database searching sections, below.

A database is a searchable electronic collection of journals which contains citations, and sometimes the full text, of articles.

The following article was found in the database EBSCOhost SocINDEX with Full Text:

Upenieks, Laura, Joanne Ford-Robertson, and Terrence Hill. 2022. "Rest for Your Souls? Religion, Meaning, and Purpose in Life, and Sleep Quality in the United States." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 61(3):619–641. doi: 10.1111/jssr.12806

Go to the library's Journal Databases by Subject page. Here you'll find sections for all the areas of study at Ambrose. At the top of the list click the Behavioural Sciences tab to open that section, then click the SocINDEX with Full Text link:

This is what the database will look like when you arrive. You know you're in SocINDEX because the name displays at the top. 

You can begin entering your search terms in the search boxes available.

This example will use the phrase "community development." You can see that there are quotation marks ( " ) around this phrase, and this is to ensure that these words are searched in this exact order; if there weren't quotation marks around this phrase, the database would look for any appearance of these words, not necessarily in this exact order.

You will also want to make use of the options in the Select a Field drop-down menu. There are many more options than in the screenshot below, so be sure to explore! This example will use the TX All Text option, which will search for "community development" in multiple areas in a record: the title, summary, abstract, subject headings, and the full text (if available). This option casts a wide net, so it is a good place to start your search! Let's click Search and see what happens.

This search retrieves over 20,000 results! This is far too many to browse through, so we want to find a way to focus our search to look for articles that are most relevant.

You may want to take note of the Subjects that appear under the titles of articles; subjects are labels that describe or pinpoint what an item is about, so if you see your search terms in the subjects, you'll know that an article is more about those concepts than if they just appear in the title, summary, or somewhere in the body of the article.

In our example, "community development" appears as a subject in some of the articles. Let's scroll back up to the top and select SU Subjects in the drop-down to search. Now the search will look for our phrase in only the subjects of articles.

You can see that we've changed the drop-down menu to SU Subjects and this has dropped our results to just over 13,000; which is more manageable, although still too many to browse through. Let's take a look at the left-hand menu, All Filters, to see if we can further refine or limit our results.

There are a number of ways to limit our results in the All Filters section.

Your instructor may require that you only reference peer reviewed sources; in this case, you can select the Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals filter. Your instructor may also require recent sources (e.g., from within the last 10 years), so you can enter a preferred date range in the Publication Date filter:

You may want to limit your results to just those languages you read:

And checking the Subjects filter may give you options on further pinpointing your topic:

By adding filters for peer-reviewed articles, date, and language in the last step, I reduced my results to just over 300. If you find adding limits is not narrowing your search enough, you may need to add search terms using the Boolean operator "AND".  

Let's add another search term to get results that may be more relevant to us. I'll add Canada as an All Text search term. If you are adding search terms you might choose something that is more relevant to your topic. I've chosen "Canada" as it will help me find articles about Canadian community development.

This has decreased the number to a very manageable 59 results. Let's take a look at one of the results in the next step.

To view the full text of an article, click the PDF Full Text link.

If you don't want to read the article right away, use the Email option to send yourself the full text, or the Permalink option to send yourself a stable link to the article.

Use the Add to folder option to create folders to organize the articles you find in your searches in your MyEBSCO account.

Use the Cite option to generate a citation for the article in a variety of citation styles that you can copy and paste into your bibliography (don't forget to review for accuracy).

This search retrieves over 20,000 results, far more than a catalogue search! On the search results page, take a look at the left-hand menu where you can see the various resource types represented. You can select these to look at only certain types of resources:

There are other filters worth exploring as well.

You may want to select Peer-reviewed Journals if your instructor has required that your sources need to be peer reviewed, or input a "from" date in Publication Date if your instructor has required that your sources need to be recent:

The Subject list can be a handy place to look for additional search terms that appear in the results; these might also be relevant to your research topic:

Be sure to check out the Databases list to see which databases these results are retrieved from; you may want to consider doing more targeted searching in one of these databases, since databases offer even more options for refining search results.

Once you've found a resource you want to view in more detail, you can click the green access links on the results page to access it:

• Get PDF will bring you the article in the format it was printed in (this is often a nice readable format).
• Read Online and Online Access may bring you to the publisher's site or to the site that the article is hosted on.
• Full text available may bring you to the library's catalogue or to the publisher's site.

Alternatively, click on the title and scroll down to the View Online section, as there may be multiple options for finding the full text online: