Spanish 211: Finding Articles

• The Williams Library Catalog includes references to many articles from scholarly journals available through the library
• It is a good starting place for preliminary exploratory searches or for when you only need a couple of articles
• For thorough searches (e.g. if you are doing a literature review) and for more advanced searches, we recommend using specialized databases, such as the ones listed below. 

When conducting research, you should pay attention to two criteria: 

1. Sources cited in the article 
   The footnotes and bibliopgrahy provide provide the scholarly context for the article and document scholarly thinking on your topic up to the point of publication of the article. This method of looking at cited sources is called "backward citation searching" 
    
2. How frequently has the article been cited 
   Finding articles and/or books that have cited the article is also very important. It helps document the importance of the article (an article frequently cited vs an article seldomly cited).  It also helps to document the evolving state of scholarship since the article was published.  This method of tracing citations is called "forward citation searching" 

How to conduct Forward Citation Searching 

Many databases offer a "cited by" option, but the simplest approach is to search Google Scholar. 
Search for the title of the article, then look for the Cited By link, underneath the reference - this will give you a list of articles and books that have cited this article.