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Universiteitsbibliotheek – LibGuides

Search strategy

Where to look for articles

Articles can be found in almost all academic engines and databases. Filter on document type: articles.
Often used search engines for articles are (amongst others):

NB For articles in print journals you search for the journal title in WorldCat and request the right volume/issue

Articles in scientific journals can be cited. That is, an author uses an article as a source for his or her own work. The articles used are then listed in the bibliography/reference list of the new article.

You can therefore find articles via these reference lists, which we also call snowball searching.
You can also actively search for articles that cite a found source, we call this citation searching.

(see also Search methods)

There are specialised citation databases like Scopus, but also Google Scholar is a good search engine to search for citations.

Citation searching is also a way to discover journals that publish articles on your subject. For instance go to the Journal Citation Reports.

Look for a well-known journal in your field and click on Cited Journal Data and Citing Journal Data. You will see lists of journals which contain citations to the well-known journal or, on the other hand, are cited by that journal. In this way you will get a network of related journals.

You are often specifically looking for peer-reviewed articles.

Peer review is a way of guaranteeing the scientific nature of an article. In peer review, an article is read and assessed anonymously by peers before publication. You can often find information about peer review on the magazine's website (in pages like: About this journal' or something similar). See also the LibGuide Evaluating sources.

There are several ways to search for peer-reviewed articles:​

  • Some search systems only contain articles from peer-reviewed journals, eg Scopus and many subject-specific databases. For this, read the information from the database itself.
  • Some search engines allow you to filter or limit to peer-reviewed articles. Note: this option is not reliable in all search systems. This option also exists in WorldCat, for example, but not all peer-reviewed articles are equally well described and the filter option is therefore not very useful here.
  • Watch the video How to recognize a peer reviewed article for more tips.

Newspaper articles can be found in specialised newspaper archives, such as:

  • Delpher for Dutch newspapers up to 1995
  • Nexis Uni for:
    • Dutch news sources from 1990 onwards, including: de Volkskrant, NRC Handelsblad, Trouw, het Algemeen Dagblad, het Parool, De Telegraaf
    • (recent volumes of) regional newspapers and some news magazines, including: De Groene Amsterdammer, Elsevier Weekblad
    • Foreign news sources, including: The Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, El País, but also hundreds of newsmagazines, for instance Fortune, The Economist
    • Company information about Dutch and international businesses, including: financial information, annual reports and ownership structures
    • (mostly American) legal sources and caselaw
  • Over twenty other archives containing newspapers. Some even have text mining options. See the overview of search systems and filter by type "news and newspapers".

Known item search

Where do you look if you already have information about an article or book, for example the exact title, words from the title or the name of the author(s)? For a known item search applies:

  • Do you know words from the title? Search in WorldCat UU (for the collection of the Utrecht University Library) or Google Scholar with UBUlink. Do you know the exact title? Put the title in double quotes (".."). No hits? Try Google.
  • Do you know only the name of the author(s)? Then Scopus, WoS or WorldCat UU dare the most useful search systems.

Digital journals

Do you know the title of a journal and possibly also the volume? In the overview of digital journals in WorldCat UU you will find current and closed subscriptions of the Utrecht University Library. You can also search by issn or browse the alphabetical list.

e-journal list in WorldCat

(click on the image to enlarge)