Honors College Research

Finding scholarly articles

While there are a variety of places where you can find academic research, a great place to start is with the Library's research database collection. Research databases are searchable collections of articles from scholarly peer-reviewed journals, magazines and newspapers. Lone Star College Libraries subscribe to a large number of database collections that students can search online, anywhere they have computer access. 

Getting Started: Academic Search Complete

Not sure where to start? Academic Search Complete is the library's multidisciplinary database that includes articles from a wide variety of subject areas. It can be a great place to begin your research before moving on to databases that specialize in more particular subjects. 

Subject Databases

Depending on your topic, you may need to search multiple databases. While there is some overlap between databases, each also searches a different set of scholarly journals and resources. To get a more complete picture of the scholarly work on your topic, you will want to search all relevant databases to see what is available.

Lone Star College Libraries : Research Databases by Subject

  Google Scholar

Google Scholar is Google's version of an academic search. 

The Good News: It limits your Google search to scholarly works from a variety of sources including universities and scholarly publishers.

The Bad News: A large portion of the resources found via Google Scholar are locked behind a paywall. (In other words, you have to pay to read the full article or book.) 

The Other Good News: The paid resources listed in Google Scholar may be available for free from the Library Databases. See the instructions below for using Full Text Finder to learn how to search for a specific article or journal in the library collections.

Open Access Resources

Resources that are available for free online usually are linked to the right side in Google Scholar. These may include public domain books, government resources, or open access scholarly articles.

Full Text Finder, or How to Search for a Journal or Article by Title

In the midst of your research, you may find citations for articles that you would like to read from looking at the bibliographies/references pages of works that you are reading or maybe through a Google Scholar search. If you have the citation for the article, you can use the Library's Full Text Finder Tool to determine if the article is available through the Lone Star College Libraries.

1. On the Research Databases page, select "Search for Publication Title" under the list of subjects. This will open Full Text Finder.

2. Enter the name of the journal, newspaper, or magazine into the box. Examples: Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of American History, PLoS One

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3. If the title is available in the Library collection, the journal name will show up in the results. The links under the journal title shows you which databases contain full-text access to that title and the years for that full-text access.

NOTE: Some titles will not be up-to-date. Check the dates to confirm. If there is a "delay" on the title, it means that the publisher has set a delay before the database can include the issues from their title.

4. Click on the database link that covers the years that you are looking for from your citation. This will take you to the journal homepage.

5. There should be a list of volumes on the right side. Click on the relevant volume, and then choose the relevant issue.

6. Selecting the issue will bring up a list of just the articles in that one particular issue of that title. Browse the list to find your article.