Academic journal articles are an excellent source of scholarly information on your topic. Here are a few tips for finding journal articles:-
You can use iFind to locate journal articles on a topic or by a particular author, if you want to carry out a more thorough search it is better to use electronic databases. Some of these databases (e.g. JSTOR) contain full-text articles, while others (e.g Web of Science) contain only a citation (or record) and abstract (a summary) of the article. In this case, you will often see a 'iGetIt@Swansea University' link which you can click on to see if we hold the article here.
This database abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Documents indexed include journal articles, book reviews, books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers.
Welsh Journals provides access to journals relating to Wales published between 1735-2007. Titles range from academic and scientific publications to literary and popular magazines.
Welsh Newspapers Online provides free access to about 120 Welsh newspaper publications up to 1919. It includes most of The Cambrian from 1804 to 1910.
JSTOR contains the full text of journals, usually from their beginning up to about 5 years ago. For more recent years, links to the full text of articles on external sites is often given. Subjects covered include ecology, economics, education, finance, history, language and literature, mathematics and statistics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, politics and population studies.
Project Muse gives us the full text of recent years of about 150 high quality peer-reviewed journals in the Humanities. A very high proportion are concerned with literature.
It also provides access to several hundred freely available ebooks.
The MLA International Bibliography gives details of most journal articles and books on modern languages and literatures (including English) from the 1920s to the present. It also has details of many journal articles and books on linguistics, folklore and film. It does not include book reviews. It is part of the EBSCOhost Database Service. It can be searched individually or in combination with other EBSCOhost databases.
This website contains concise biographies of Welsh people who made a significant contribution to national life.
Keywords
Getting more results
Getting fewer results
Critically appraising your sources is a crucial element of any literature search. You need to consider is your sources are:
Ask yourself the following questions about the information you have found.
Who?
When?
What sort of information?
This is a list of databases that may be relevant to Welsh students. Please explore this a-z or look at the following pages for more guidance to the databases. If you click 'view more results' you can explore all our databases, access database descriptions, and filter by database type.
Google can be a useful tool for finding information online. However, it can be difficult to find the most relevant and reliable sources of information from a list of thousands or millions of results. Don't assume the results at the top are the best ones! The following strategies will help you search Google more effectively.
Use your keywords and the command site:url to find results from one website or from a group of websites. For instance, a search for foundation phase site:gov.wales will find information about the Foundation Phase from the Welsh Government website. You could use site:ac.uk to search academic websites.
Use the command filetype: to limit your search to a particular type of document. This can be useful if you are looking for a certain type of information. For example, if you government documents are likely to be published in PDF form, so you could use filetype:pdf to limit your results to PDFs and make it easier to find what you need. Numerical data is likely to appear in a spreadsheet, so you could use filetype:xls to look for Excel documents.
Google Scholar searches scholarly literature such as journal articles and abstracts, but you may have difficulty accessing the full-text of the material you find. Linking your Google Scholar account to Swansea University will help with this. Just go to the settings cog from the menu
and then go to Library Links to find Swansea University.
Although Google Scholar can be useful, iFind and subject databases such as Science Direct have certain key advantages:-
Most print journals about Welsh literature or language are at call numbers beginning PR on Level 1 West. Use the library catalogue iFind to find out the call number of a journal.