History: Find Articles

With dubSearch, you can search multiple databases at once to simultaneously browse articles, books, DVDs, newspapers, and multimedia content.

If you are off campus, you can still access research databases. Your my.whittier username and password allows you to access databases from home. 

Provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.

So what's a database? Simply, databases are online indexes to articles.  Originally, databases provided basic information about articles, and sometimes included a helpful abstract (summary) of particular articles. Increasingly, more and more databses contain instantly accessible full-text articles. although many still contain just abstracts and/or citation information. In this latter case, see the following section in order to get the article you need.

Researchers can search databases by keywords, subjects, titles, and authors, among other criteria. The library has a number of databases to help you find articles from scholarly journals, newspapers, and popular magazines. The following list includes useful databases for students of history. Your MyWhittier username and password is required to access our subscription databases.

If you have discovered the title of an article in a database that does not provide full-text to the journal it's from, or noted the title of an article you want cited in a secondary source, you'll need to determine whether Wardman Library subscribes to the journal you seek.

Many journals are listed in the library catalog. However, a more comprehensive list is accessible through the "Journal Titles A-Z" index. This is the quickest way to figure out if the library holds a particular journal.  Follow these steps to use this resource:

• Before you search make sure you have the full citation of the article that you want to find, including the title of the journal, the volume, issue number, and date of the article.
• Click here. Or, from the library homepage click on the link for JOURNAL TITLES A-Z.
• Type in the title of the journal -- not the article -- that you are searching for. This will search all of the library’s print and electronic journals at once.
• The search results will tell you if and where the journal can be found -- either in one of the library’s electronic databases and/or in the library’s print collection.
• Make sure you check the date and/or volume number of the journal.  The journal may be available but is it available for the specific volume that you need in order to find the article?
• If your article is available electronically there will be a link to follow.  Click for full-text.
• If your article is available via Wardman Print Journals then you need to come into the library to make a copy. Journals published before the current year will be shelved on the top floor.  Any issue from the current year is on the first floor.  All journals are shelved alphabetically by title. 

If your search produced no results then you may try to request the article through an interlibrary loan (see the following section).

So you found the perfect article but the source you are searching only gave you the abstract or the citation. What now? Do you have to search every single database the library owns for just one article? Absolutely not! Use the Journal Titles A-Z list to see if the library owns the full text of an article. Follow the steps below to find the full text.

1. Look up the journal title using the Journal Titles A – Z list. If full text is available electronically, you can follow the link to the database containing the journal. If full text is available in print, you can follow the Wardman Print Journals link to see the physical holdings. Note: All print journals are located on the 2nd floor in ABC order.
2. Copy and paste the article title into Google Scholar. Sometimes you can find the full text freely available online.
3. If the first two steps are unsuccessful, please fill out the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) form.