How should you go about finding scholarly articles (from peer-reviewed journals), especially if you are distance students who do not have access physically to the ISU University Library?

Below I describe what you should do:

(1) First do a Google Search (using Google Scholar) to find articles in which you are interested.

Let's say you find an abstract for an article in the journal "Science Magazine" that you think looks promising. Remember, you are looking for an article in a peer-reviewed journal. Scholarly sources are *not* newspapers, magazines intended for the general public, websites like Wikipedia (which is reviewed by the general public, not experts in a given field), or encyclopedias (which are directed at the general public rather than professionals in a specific field).

(2) Next, you should go to the website for "Science Magazine" and check that the articles are peer-reviewed. You are in luck!  You find that "Science Magazine" is peer-reviewed, which means that it sends manuscripts to experts in the field who decide whether the manuscripts should be accepted for publication, rewritten, or rejected.  However, unfortunately, you can only view the abstract. You need the whole article!

(3) You should make sure you know the authors, publication year, title, journal name, volume, and page number of the article you want.

(4) Finally, you should contact the ISU Library reference people (online) to ask them how to get a copy of that article...or if you are on campus you can go in person.

Here's a website link to the ISU University Library reference area:

http://www.lib.iastate.edu/libinfo/askalib/qp_askalib.html

If you go to this web page, you will see it has options for online and distance students who need help finding articles. The ISU library has a live chatroom in which you can ask a reference librarian your questions. They also have a phone number and e-mail address for contacting them. Ideally you will be able to give them your reference citation and they can help you find it, perhaps through interlibrary loan if necessary. This may involve them sending you an e-mail copy of the article.

I hope this helps!

--Erica

Erica Fuchs
World Food Issues teaching assistant