Bottled Water : Finding Articles

How do you find journal articles, instead of books? You use a database. There are many different databases to use at UW-Madison, based on what subject you are researching. Some database are general and others are subject-specific. Consider starting with the same keywords you used to search for books: bottled water, drinking water, etc.

A good place to start your search are water-related databases. Please note: most databases give you search tips to use in order to find exactly what you are looking for.

Water-related databases:

• Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts  
  indexes more than 5000 journals, reports, conference proceedings, and books in the area of Aquatic Sciences including aquaculture, limnology, oceanography, and marine environments, environmental quality, and water pollution.
• Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management
  is a multidisciplinary database covers all areas of air, land, water and noise pollution as well as basic science areas of bacteriology, ecology, toxicology, environmental engineering, environmental biotechnology, waste management, and water resources.
• Water Resources Abstracts  
  indexes and abstracts international scientific and technical literature on water resource-related aspects of the physical, social, and life sciences.
• Engineering Village

General science and research databases:

• Academic Search
  
  a multi-disciplinary database that provides full text for more than 4,650 journals, including approximately 3,900 peer-reviewed titles.
• Web of Knowledge
  is a combination of three databases: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Indexes more than 8000 peer-reviewed journals, and includes author-supplied abstracts where available.
• ProQuest Research Library
  
  Indexes more than 2,000 periodicals and provides the full text of nearly 1,000 of them.

This quick search function is a short cut to some top databases on a subject and when you put in your search term, it is search across all the databases at once.  Start here by choosing a general subject area. 

Databases will find you both print and electronic articles.  Once you have your citations, you can look here for an electronic full text version of an article.  Not all articles are available this way - some are only available in print in the library.

Use the Find It button to get the full text:

What is a journal? What is a magazine? What makes them different? How will I know the difference?

A journal:

• always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies. These bibliographies are lengthy and cite other scholarly writings.
• reports on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world.

A magazine:

• reports news and offers general interest articles and only sometimes cite sources.
• provides information, in a general manner, to a broad audience of concerned citizens.

Source: adapted from Cornell University Library