Finding background information
Finding scholarly articles will be easier if you use background sources to find:
- A broad overview of the topic
- Important dates, names and other facts
- Key terms for searching
Academic encyclopedias available through the library undergo a thorough review process and can be cited in course papers.
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CQ : Congressional Quarterly ResearcherProvides snapshots of current affairs. Single-themed reports are researched and written by experienced observers from a range of viewpoints. From 1923 to present.
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Credo Reference
Provides access to a collection of aggregated and integrated reference books from high-quality publishers.
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SAGE Reference E-Books
Growing collection of topic and subject encyclopedias online. Note: To search only UIC subscribed titles, please click the Available to me button on the right.
Research Methods
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SAGE Research MethodsProvides over 1,000 core texts as well as thousands of additional videos, cases, datasets, tools, and how-to guides for research methods across the disciplines.
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ICPSR : Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social ResearchArchives of social science data for research and instruction.
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COSMIC (Compendium of Scales and Measures in Communication)COSMIC is the primary repository for the communication and journalism fields for published indexes, scales, and other systems for measurement, and for published articles treating topics in measurement procedure, research design, data analysis, and other issues in methodology.
Finding articles in Communication journals
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Communication & Mass Media CompletePros: Comprehensive coverage of core journals in communication and mass media studies selected by experts, simple to limit by year and article type.
Cons: Search language can be rigid. -
ACM Digital Library
Provides access to tables of contents, abstracts, reviews, and full text of all articles published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and citations from major publishers in computing.
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ComAbstractsPros: Focused on core academic communication journals; simple to limit by year and article type.
Cons: Search language is more rigid -
Google ScholarPros: Flexible, familiar search language; "Cited by" feature leads to newer articles that include a reference to your relevant article.
Cons: Haphazard journal coverage; no way to limit to scholarly journals; must link through the UIC Library site to get full text from e-journals. -
JSTORPros: Complete full text of important journals (but UIC does not own 100% of JSTOR content)
Cons: No subject indexing; inflexible search -
Web of Science
Multidisciplinary coverage of over 10,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as published proceedings for over 12,000 conferences per year, and over 50,000 scholarly books. Allows searching for articles in the database that have cited a particular work, as well as perform other analytics.
Generative AI
Check course policies before using ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, etc.
Bias can result from the data the tool was trained on (no way to know what it was).
In your prompts:
- Ask what academic journals the tool has access to.
- Instruct the tool not to fabricate sources.
- Check the sources in the library search to make sure they exist and are peer reviewed.
Media Sources
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Access World News Research Collection: 2023 Edition
Provides current and archived news content from more than 13,800 United States and international newspapers, news services, magazines, blogs, transcripts, and more. Date coverage varies with individual newspaper. See the Newspapers Research Guide.
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American Archive of Public BroadcastingFree streaming access to public television and radio programs of the past 60 years.
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CAN TV ArchivesArchive of public access TV programs produced by Chicago residents since 1983. Topics include public housing, corruption, police reform, and local politics.
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Nexis Uni
New version of Lexis Nexis Academic. Nexis Uni features news, business, and legal sources, radio and television transcripts, federal and state court cases, U.S. Supreme Court decisions back to 1790, and full-text law review articles. See the Newspapers Research Guide for library database coverage of the top 20 U.S. newspapers.
BrowZine App
UIC Liaison Librarian for Communication
