ENGL 015 (Sloboda)
ENGL 015 (Sloboda)
You can find additional information on what we are covering on the START in the Library page.
We’ll be concentrating on finding your article or issue on Tuesday, April 3, and then finding additional sources for your essay on Thursday, April 5.
- Access World News (NewsBank) Search newspapers from around the world, or narrow your search to major newspapers, United States newspapers, or Pennsylvania newspapers. This database contains The Sun (Baltimore), The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, and local papers such as The Patriot-News (Harrisburg), the York Daily Record, the York Sunday News, The York Dispatch, and the Lancaster papers.
A sample search strategy is shown above for the Philadelphia Daily News. In this example, I first selected Pennsylvania Newspapers from the Shortcuts menu and then chose the Philadelphia Daily News from the Source List.
I originally searched within the Section (rather than the Headline, as in the above image) for the term editorial. However, my results included a lot of very short letters to the editor. From that list of results, I noticed the actual editorials began with the phrase “DN editorial,” so I revised my search term.
Since you must find an editorial published after September, 2011, I limited the date range.
Example: “Ban on Food Distribution on Parkway Heats Up” An editorial from the Philadelphia Daily News, March 19, 2012.
- Chronicle of Higher Education Take a look at the Opinions & Ideas section for topics of interest, such as the following:
“Authority Figures” by Mark Bauerlein (March 18, 2012) compares Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. What are we losing by having our reference sources constantly updated?
“Colleges Should Teach Intellectual Virtues” by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe (February 19, 2012). Do you agree?
- Factiva You can search for editorials from several major newspapers using the dropdown menu on the News pages or by using the Search Builder as shown below:
Factiva Search Builder
- PressDisplay Only recent issues (usually within the past 60 days) are included in PressDisplay, but, since the papers are full page reproductions, it’s easy to find the editorials. Searching tips: From the Select Title drop-down menu, choose Librarian’s Picks. You’ll find papers such as the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and USA Today. There is a drop-down Table of Contents, but I don’t usually see Editorials listed there. I think it’s easier to look at the actual Table of Contents, usually found on the front page of the paper. Note that some papers, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, use the word Opinion, rather than Editorial in their Table of Contents.
In Advanced Search, you can also limit your results to a specific date range: 
U.S. News & World Report This magazine is no longer available in print, but is now an online only publication. Choose the News tab and then you’ll see tabs for Opinion and Debate Club. Both will be useful for this assignment. - Academic Search Complete There are hundreds of magazines and newspapers (as well as scholary journal articles) in this database. Try using the search strategy shown below, remembering to limit by the date range. You may want to Update your results by Source Types, choosing Magazines and Newspapers.
- ProQuest (Multiple databases) You’ll get a lot of results with the following search strategy, but take your time looking through them and find something interesting:
SEARCH OPTIONS Source type: Magazines, Newspapers Document type: Commentary, Editorial