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Michigan State University

LB 133 Spring 2021

Some Clues to Look for in Your Popular Source

Find as many of these clues as you can in your popular source. Then you can enter them into an academic database and hopefully find the scholarly article it's based on. If you don't find it in one database, try another! Sometimes you'll need to combine a couple of clues to find the original article (for example, date of publication and journal title, or journal title and topic).

  • Article title
  • Journal title
  • Date of publication
  • Names of author(s)
  • Workplaces or affiliations of author(s) (What university do they work for? What labs do they work for?)
  • Study name--some larger research projects will have names that you can search for. For example, "Man Up Man Down" is the name of an extended project that studies health and stress in African American men in Michigan.
  • Topic--this is not always a good clue, because there may be many articles on the same topic. But it may help in combination with one or more of the other types of information.

Databases

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