FTS: Animal Minds: Finding Articles

Use one or more of the databases below to find articles related to animal minds.

Academic Search Premier covers not only academic journals but also popular magazines, including the scientific journalism magazines listed below. They can be useful sources since they're usually more concise than articles in academic journals and use less technical language.

Once you've identified an interesting article, look to see if the full text is there. If not, follow these steps:

• Click the yellow "find it!" button, which will search to see if it is full text in another database or in the library's print collection. 
• If it is full text in another database, click the links to get to the article itself. Note: the systems don't always talk to each other perfectly. Sometimes the links go to the wrong places. If this is the case, contact a librarian. We are happy to help you track it down.
• If the article is full text in print, take a field trip to the bottom floor of the library. Print journals are shelved alphabetically by title of the journal. Find the section containing your journal and then track down the article using the date/volume information. With the exception of the most recent issue of some popular magazines, you may check magazines and journals out for a week.

If an article is not available in full text or in print, request it through interlibrary loan, using your Gustavus account login to identify yourself. This generally means it will be scanned in for you at another library. An e-mail message will be sent to you with a URL and pin number to retrieve it. Though these scanned articles are sometimes are available within 24 hours, they can take longer. Plan ahead.

Sometimes you come across a footnote with an article that looks interesting. You don't need to turn to a database to find it. Check the title of the magazine or journal (not the article title) from the journal locator. If it is not available to us at Gustavus, log in to your library account and fill out an interlibrary loan request.

As you can see, tracking down the hard copies of materials can be tricky! Need help? Contact a librarian!

Quite often you will be expected to use "scholarly" or "peer reviewed" or "academic" sources. How can you tell whether a source is scholarly? Look for these indicators.

• The author is a scientist or scholar, not a journalist. Usually you can find some note about where the author works, and more often than not it's at a college or university. The author usually has the highest degree in their field (like Ph.D.).
• The audience is other researchers, scientists, or scholars, (as well as students in a given field), so the language is fairly complex and assumes a level of sophistication. 
• It includes references to the work of other researchers. Look for bibliographic notes and/or a works cited page.
• Scholarly sources are usually published by academic publishers (like Oxford University Press); articles appear in scholarly journals, often with titles like Journal of ....

Though many databases let you limit a search to scholarly or peer reviewed articles, those limiters aren't foolproof. As an example, they will include book reviews, which are not reporting original research. Take a look at "Anatomy of a Scholarly Article" from North Carolina State University Library.

Peer review means the source has been reviewed prior to publication (usually without the reviewers knowing who wrote the source and vice versa); reviewers will then recommend if the work should be published. Many - but not all - scholarly sources have been peer reviewed. To check if your scholarly article has been peer reviewed, you can visit the journal's website.