How to Find Articles

The best way to get started is with COM Library databases. Not only will you get the full text articles that are the college level sources that your instructors expect you to use, you'll save time! Here are some great features:

• Grab citations for your articles. You can see step by step how to grab the citations and tweak them  in our APA and MLA guides.
• Articles can be printed, downloaded or emailed.
• You can save time by using full text time limits and more.
• You can create free personal database accounts that lat you save and organize your articles and searches. 
• Find out how to use these great database features step by step in our guides.

Our most popular databases with students and instructors are Academic OneFile, Academic Search Complete and Research Library. They have articles and article citations from thousands of journals and magazines on virtually every academic subject.

COM Library Guides collect the best databases to search for your subjects, as well as some top articles. Look for the page Articles in the guides.

You can get started now by going Straight to the Good Stuff. 

• Full-text articles from popular periodicals
• Medical resources and health information
• eBooks
• Academic reference materials
• Newspapers and magazines from around the world
• Transcripts from TV and Radio
• Research on public and private companies, here and abroad
• Consumer marketing data and emerging technology reports
• Genealogy resources
• Latest breaking news and daily updates from newspaper wire services
• Hundreds of popular periodicals, including Business Week, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian
• Streaming media

Use our great A-Z Databases to search for books, eBooks, articles, streaming media and primary sources. Our databases even provide citations (we can show you how!).

Search OneSearch to search print books, eBooks articles and streaming media simultaneously, or select Go! to get started with all our databases.

Go!

Searching a database is better than searching Google for college level research. Not only will it you save time, you'll get better quality resources.

Here's Why Databases Are Better

• A search engine won't turn up many websites containing full-text articles from the kind of publications your instructors are looking for.
• Sad, but true: not everything is on the Internet. Few substantive materials are on the Internet for free.
• There is no quality control for information on the Internet.
• 2/3 college students said the Internet doesn't offer a range of resources wide enough for their research needs.

--Source: The Top Ten Reasons TexShare Is Better Than Just Surfing the Internet, Texas State Library.

Wait, There's More!

Some magazine and journal publishers do publish articles on the Internet. Generally this is limited to sample articles or even just abstracts of the articles, so if you do search the Internet for articles you generally will not find many on your topic.

Since all the library's databases can be accessed at home and have thousands more journals available than what is freely available on the Internet, using the databases makes more sense. You will get you a lot more articles at the college level that your instructors expect and in less time.