Nexis Uni
Nexis Uni
An extensive database. For this project, particularly useful for finding news articles and press releases.
- Nexis Uni
- Because this is also a broad database, try making your searches specific with the following techniques to find the most relevant results.
- "Quotation marks" around a search (example: "The Wire") makes the database look for those words exactly in the order they're in inside the quotation marks
- Useful to combine with more general search terms like "HBO" and "TV" and "show" to specify that you're looking for information about the TV show The Wire instead of other things that might use the words "Wire" and "HBO" and "TV" and "show"
- To find general news articles, after doing a search make sure that in the top left Snapshot box only "News" is active (it should be that way by default)
- To find press releases in particular, after doing a search go to the filters under the Snapshot box, click on "Publication Type", then click on "Newswires & Press Releases"
- In the filters below the Snapshot box, go to the Language option and choose English
- "Quotation marks" around a search (example: "The Wire") makes the database look for those words exactly in the order they're in inside the quotation marks
- Because this is also a broad database, try making your searches specific with the following techniques to find the most relevant results.
Other Databases for Non-Scholarly Articles
Other Databases with Non-Scholarly Resources
These databases collect sources with mostly non-scholarly articles. Because the sources aren't specifically about television or entertainment, you might have to make your searches more specific using techniques like "quotation mark exact searches", filters, and more keywords to find the materials most relevant to your questions.
- America's News Magazines This link opens in a new windowCoverage of U.S. and international news, business, lifestyle, entertainment, sports, and science and technology from 26 familiar magazines.
- Alt-Press Watch This link opens in a new windowFull-text database indexes over 250 alternative, radical and left periodicals, newspapers and magazines. Includes selected abstracts from research journals. (Main Library Reference Area holds vol. 1- July 1969- to present in the paper edition.)
- Ethnic Newswatch Complete This link opens in a new windowEthnic NewsWatch is a current resource of full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press, providing researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives
- GenderWatch This link opens in a new windowPrimarily a full text database with some abstracts that contains periodicals, academic journals, newsletters, magazines, regional publications, and government reports focused on gender and women's issues.
The Perch
The Perch
A physical and online space at the library designed to help you find articles from contemporary popular sources. The physical space is at the Main Library, past the security gates that are in front of the check-out desk. To learn how to access its online resources, please look at the links below.
- Magazines - Magazines are some of the best places to find articles from popular sources, because they usually have a consistent point of view. For this assignment, perhaps magazines focused on entertainment such as Rolling Stone, Variety, and The New Yorker might be interesting to search through.
- To search through specific magazines, click on the "Full Text Online" link next to the picture of the magazine in question
- Newspapers and Reviews - These are other great places to find articles from popular sources. These are especially good for seeing different/regional opinions on something as time passes, by for example comparing coverage of an event on the day that it happened versus coverage from a week/month/year/etc later.
- To search through specific newspapers/reviews, click on the "Full Text Online" link next to the picture of the resource in question
Google is a surprisingly good way to find non-scholarly articles as well. You can always just google your topic as you would anything else, but there are also more specific ways to search that you can learn more about below.
- Search For Exact Phrase - you can tell Google, or any database really, to search for a phrase exactly as you've typed it in by using quotation marks around your search term like so: "search term"
- For example: "chocolate cake" (115,000,000 results that specifically include the words "chocolate cake") vs chocolate cake (1,470,000,000 results that might include other things like chocolate mousse cake, chocolate ice cream cake, red velvet chocolate cake, etc., that you might not be looking for)
- Search Within Specific Website - you can tell Google to look through just one site by typing into the search box: "searchterm" site:website.com
- For example: "cookies" site:nytimes.com
- NOTE: When using Google to find articles, you might reach websites that have paywalls, which might not let you look at multiple articles. If you do reach a paywall, please look through our library resources here at The Perch or in InfoHawk+ to see if we have a copy of the article that the library has already paid for so that you can access it!
- Trying searching for the name of the article, the author of the article, or the publication the article was in