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Anthropology Research Guide

Search Tips

Basic Search Tips

Boolean Operators: Use AND, OR, NOT to expand or narrow results.

  • adhd OR neurodivergent [useful with synonyms]
  • natural disaster AND economy

“Phrase Searching”: Use quotation marks (“”) around words to search for an exact phrase. 

  • “social media”

Wildcard/Truncation: Use an asterisk (*) to search for words with similar beginnings. 

  • Chican* = Chican, Chicana, Chicanas, Chicanx...

Terminology

Scholarly journals contain articles written by, and addressed to, experts in a discipline. Scholarly journals present the research of experts in a field, although these journals also often carry opinion pieces or even advertisements unique to the field addressed by the journal.

Peer-reviewed journals (also called refereed or juried journals) send submitted articles to one or more experts for review before deciding to publish them. This review process helps ensure that published articles reflect solid scholarship in a field. Most often, the experts reviewing an article make critical comments on the text, comments that the author must incorporate into the article before its publication.

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Databases & Journals

Below are a list of useful library databases related to Anthropology. The content below is organized by top databases in anthropology (a great place to start), databases with images and videosfield-specific anthropology databases (biological, sociocultural, archaeology, and linguistics), and then a list of multidisciplinary databases related to anthropology. Remember, if you cannot find the article or book you need in our catalog, use our Interlibrary Loan program to see if another library send us a copy.

Additional information on search strategies and terminology are located in the left column of the page. If you are looking for databases on specific peoples, please visit the relevant library research guides for additional databases and digital collections (the History Research Guide is especially helpful).

Top Databases for Anthropology

Images and Video

Biological Anthropology

Sociocultural Anthropology

Archaeology

Linguistic Anthropology

Related Databases


Journals & Magazines

The links below will take you to the library's Journal Locator, where you will see which databases contain the specific journal. It is possible (and likely) that multiple databases have articles from your journal; however, often each databases will contain journal articles from different time periods. For example, Academic Search Premier has issues of Nature from 1997-2015, while Academic OneFile has issues from 2000-Present. 

Peer-Reviewed Journals

Magazines