Once you have found one article that suits your purposes, do not forget what a terrific resource the list of references/works cited for that article can be. If the author has listed ten references and you only like five of them, you've already found six articles (the original plus the five listed in the references). It is usually easy to find an article if you have a complete citation.
It is easy to find an article if you have the correct citation.
Step 1: Use the A-Z List of Journals to find your journal title
Step 2: Choose the database that will have the year you need
Step 3: Locate the volume and issue numbers
Remember: Do not try to search for the article title in Primo. That often does not produce results.
Let's find this article using the citation
I know, I know. You want to type "community accountability, minority threat, and police brutality" into the library's Primo search box. That would not be the best way to find your article, though. That strategy only works about 40% of the time. Instead, go to the library's page and click the Databases & Journals tab and then choose A-Z List of Journals.
From there, search for the journal title, in this case, Criminology.
You can see that Criminology comes up first because it is an exact match to the title we searched. Click on it, and you will see a screen like this:
As you know, we subscribe to hundreds of databases. There is some overlap in coverage. In this case, we receive Criminology in four different databases. Three of them cover the journal from 1994-2006; the fourth covers it beginning in 1997 through to the current issue.
This is important because if you were looking for an article published in 2015, it would not be in the first three databases on the list. If you were looking for an article published in 1996, it would not be in the last database on the list.
Our article was published in 2003, so we may choose any from any of the databases. To make things easy, let's choose the first on the list.
It takes us to the Publication Information page. This page can be helpful when you are preparing to submit your own articles to a journal -- it tells you how long it has been published and under what names, the publication language, who the audience is, and more.
For our purposes, however, we just want to browse specific issues. Look at the bottom of this screenshot. The article we need was published in 2003, so we are going to choose the appropriate decade.
And then the appropriate year.
From here, we want to choose the correct volume and issue. It is Vol. 41, Issue 4.
(Side note: If, in the course of your research, you find a particular journal that frequently publishes about your topic and you want to just read whole issues, these are the same steps you could follow to do that.)
When you choose Vol. 41, Issue 4, you are taken into the issue. You will see everything published in that issue. We can scroll down until we find our article.
Click on the article title and it will take you to the article, with all the features and options than any article in our databases offer.
