Public Administration and Public Affairs: Article Databases

See below for some journals that faculty at the School of Public Affairs (SPA) recommend:

First, organize your research topic into concepts. Concepts are typically nouns or noun phrases.

• For example, if you are researching the political and economic implications of social security benefits, your concepts would be:
  • political implications
  • economics
  • social security benefits

Using a databases's Advanced Search, enter each concept and its synonyms into a separate search line.

• "social security benefits"
• econom* OR politic*
• implications

Use quotation marks around phrases, these are typically noun phrases that you would find a definition of in a dictionary.

• "social security"
• "political implications"

Use * for truncation.

• Econom* will find economy, economics, economic, economical, etc.

Limit to peer-reviewed articles if necessary.

Limit by date if necessary.

Too many or too few results?

• Use the thesaurus or Subject Index to find related, broader, narrower, and similar terms OR specific terms that the databases uses to describe a topic.
  • Too many results? Use a narrower term.
  • Too few results? Use a broader term.

Find an article that looks interesting?

• Click on the article's title.
• Look at the subjects given to an article to find related terms and run additional searches using these terms.
• Click on the references, cited by, or see similar documents links to find related articles.