Questioning Empire

 There are two basic ways to search for articles on a topic:

1 - Searching in ZipSearch

2 - Searching in individual databases

Searching in ZipSearch

ZipSearch is a tool that searches in many different databases simultaneously, including those that contain Pan-African content, such as:

Learn about ZipSearch

Go to the ZipSearch Guide to see when and how to use ZipSearch.

Searching Individual Databases

There are several reasons you may want to search in only one database:

• If you are trying ZipSearch and are getting too many results, that is one way to limit your search
• You only want one type of result, such as a biography on a person (for biographies, see )
• Many databases are not included or covered completely in ZipSearch, so they must be searched individually.  For those databases with Pan-African content that are not in ZipSearch, see "Other databases".

Limiting your search:

Most databases allow you to "limit"  your search by:

• Choosing a date range
• Choosing to search only for scholarly or peer reviewed articles
• Choosing to search only for results that have the full text attached
• Other options, such as subject, language, or type of publication (newspaper, journal, magazine, etc.)

Selecting one or all of these options will help make your search more specific and reduce the number of results.

Make sure you look for and use these options no matter which database you search.

You found the perfect article; now how do you get the full text?

• Sometimes the complete article is available immediately.  You will see a link for the PDF or HTML version of the full text if the article is available from that database.  If it is available from another database that the University of Akron subscribes to, there will be a link that says "full text through LinkSource".  If you click on that link, you should be redirected to the full text.
• If the full text is not available, click on the button that says "request through InterLibrary Loan" to automatically request the item.  If the database doesn't have that button, write down the citation information, and enter the request through InterLibrary Loan manually.   (see Tutorial tab for help)

Do you know where the Article is (what journal, conference, volume, pages, etc)? Use the UA Libraries Catalog. opens new window

• For journals, use a title search (exact title) opens new window
• For conferences, use a keyword search opens new window
• Pay attention to the volumes and years that we have. For more assistance, please contact me.

Need a Specific Article that Can't be Downloaded and is not in our Library? Try