The most common way to find articles, whether they are scholarly articles or not, is to search article databases. The library subscribes to dozens; I've listed the ones that are closely associated with political science below. You can also find articles via Google Scholar. The best researchers don't just use one database; they use many databases to cast a wide net. If you have any issues searching or accessing materials, email Julie.
A good place to start research on most any subject. This multi-disciplinary database indexes nearly 8,050 publications and provides full text for nearly 4,600, including more than 3,900 peer-reviewed journals. Access is provided by eLibraryMN (ELM).
Contains full text documents on international politics and related fields. Includes content from government research organizations, independent think tanks, university analysis centers, and scholarly journals. Also includes country surveys with political data, economic data, and maps from The Economist Intelligence Unit.
Index to congressional publications from 1970 to the present, legislative histories for public laws, testimony at congressional hearings, and biographical and committee information. Also allows searching of the Congressional Record and Federal Register.
Provides reporting and analysis on issues in the news, with coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the economy. Each report includes an introductory overview, a background and chronology, an assessment of the current situation, a pro/con debate by representatives of opposing positions, and bibliographies of key sources.
This search engine points toward scholarly research rather than all Web-based sources. It is stronger in the sciences than in the humanities, with social sciences somewhere in between. One interesting feature of Google Scholar is that in includes a link to sources that cite a particular item. Not all of the articles in Google Scholar are free; the library can obtain many of them for you through Interlibrary loan.
JSTOR is a digital library of journals, academic eBooks, images, and primary sources. JSTOR provides book and journal content from the date of initial publication up to a "moving wall" of 3 to 5 years before the present year.
The easiest way to access news articles is through these databases. This will get you around any paywalls you might encounter if you were just searching Google for newspaper articles.
Provides the full text of global, regional and local news sources. Coverage ranges from over 40 Minnesota sources to international sources from over 200 countries.
Student Senate pays annually for the New York Times Education and Library Subscription Program, which gives the entire campus - students, faculty, and staff - access to four newspapers: the New York Times, Star Tribune, USA Today and the Mankato Free Press. Login directions for the newspapers in the program are here.
When you have a source with a bibliography, you can see if a particular article from the bibliography is available by looking the journal's name up at the link below. Then you can use the volume and date information to navigate to the article. If we don't have access to that journal, we usually can get it from another library.
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