LIBRARY RESEARCH BASICS

Step One - Plan your paper: Research Paper Navigator
Step Two - Set up RefWorks to organize and format your citations: more info
Step Three - Research

Finding Books in the Library Catalog
On the Tisch Library homepage select Library Catalog.

If you want to find information about someone (i.e. literary criticism of an author, biographical information), try a Subject search.

Example Subject Searches

• Avicenna
• Farabi

If you are searching for information on topics such as multiculturalism or western films, try a Keyword search.
Use the connectors AND, OR, or NOT to join more than one topic/keyword.

Example Keyword Searches

• secularism and islam
• (islam** or muslim**) and clothing

Note: In the Library Catalog two asterisks ** are needed for truncation, whereas in many databases only one asterisk * is needed--but ALWAYS CHECK THE HELP SCREEN IN EVERY DATABASE to learn how to do the best (and fastest) searches!

Finding Articles in the Library Databases
To search for articles using the library databases, go to the Tisch Library Website and select Databases and Articles under Searching. Type in the name of the database in the search box or use the A-Z list to locate it.

Use the following collections to find articles about your topic.

• Academic OneFile - Includes over 8,000 peer-reviewed journals, the majority in full-text. Extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects. Some full text available, in both PDF and HTML.

• Index Islamicus - The Index Islamicus covers Islam, the Middle East and the Muslim world. It is produced by the Islamic Bibliography Unit of the Cambridge University Library and indexes articles back to 1906.

• LexisNexis - Includes full-text articles from American and international newspapers. Also provides sources for legal research, congressional information, statistics, business information, and environmental research.

• JSTOR All full-text, but nothing current (within the past 5 years or more).
  List of Middle East Studies journals found in JSTOR:
  Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 1981-2003
  Arab Law Quarterly 1985-2001
  British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 1991-2003
  Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 1974-1990
  Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1940-2001
  Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London 1917-1940
  International Journal of Middle East Studies 1970-2001
  Islamic Law and Society 1994-2001
  Journal of Near Eastern Studies 1942-2002 (plus links to recent content 2003-2006)
  American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 1895-1941
  Hebraica 1884-1895
  Journal of Palestine Studies 1971-2003
  Journal of the American Oriental Society 1843-2003
  Middle East Report 1988-2003
  MERIP Middle East Report 1986-1988
  MERIP Reports 1971-1985
  Muqarnas 1983-2001
  Oriens 1948-2001
  Pakistan Forum 1970-1973

Finding Materials at Other Libraries

Books

• If you want to search for books on your topic beyond what's available at the Tufts University Libraries use WorldCat. You can access this database on the Databases & Articles page.
• If you want to borrow a book that is not available at Tufts University Libraries, follow these steps:

1. Search the Boston Library Consortium Virtual Catalog by clicking on its link along the top menu of the Library Catalog. This catalog contains the book holdings at most of the BLC libraries. Users can directly request books through the catalog and pick up the books at Tisch Library.
2. If the book is not available through the BLC Virtual Catalog, Submit an online request through the document delivery service - ILLIAD. Users are notified when the material arrives at Tisch. You can sign up for an ILLiad account by clicking on First Time Users at the ILLiad home page.

Articles

• Articles not available in full-text through our libraries' databases and print collections can be requested through ILLiad. You can sign up for an ILLiad account by clicking on First Time Users at the ILLiad home page.
• You can also use ILLiad directly within the databases.

The database only gives me a citation/just an abstract. How do I find the full text?

• Use , OR (if it isn't working):
• look up the journal title (not the article title) by using the JOURNAL TITLE search option in the library catalog to find out if we own it electronically or in print. Be sure to check the range of dates we own before running to the shelves!

Is a journal I've found scholarly/peer-reviewed/refereed?

• Look it up in Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory. Check the "document type" field in the record for that journal.

Evaluating Web Sites

• Use other Search Engines dedicated to more scholarly web sources.
• Guidelines for evaluating a website's authority/bias

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