Physics  Tags: physics astronomy energy  

• An article is a literary composition forming an independent part of a publication such as a magazine, newspaper, or encyclopedia.  
• Faculty expect edited pieces from a valid publisher; information on the web from companies or individuals and wikipedia often "fail" the article-test.
• Faculty may require articles of a particular type, i.e. newspaper, popular magazine, or scholarly journal.  See this chart for a refresher.
• Although there are valid, edited, "published" born-digital articles (e.g. CNN), many articles are still produced in paper form and electronic access occurs through databases that collect articles from many publications into one place. 
• Some of the most useful of these databases for your discipline are listed to the right.  

1. Try a title or keyword search
2. Look for useful "subject" or "descriptor" words.  These will either be in a list on the results page, or you may need to look at a number of individual records
3. Go back to the search screen and search BY SUBJECT/DESCRIPTOR (not by title/keyword) using the words you discovered in step two
4. Be sure to take advantage of:
   • Boolean connectors (AND, OR, NOT)
   • Truncation/Wildcard (educat*)
   • Phrase searching ("childhood obesity")
5. When you find an item you want, use ArticleLinker to get it.

More detailed directions can be found on our Searching Databases page.

Look for position-taking pieces and/or analyses of issues in:

Physics MultiSearch - for articles

Or search individual databases. Most relevant for this subject are:

Browse a list of our physics journals - both print and online

Browse by subject : Physics and Astronomy

Check for the availability, online or in paper, of a particular magazine or journal.

Periodical title search