ANTH 140 Physical Anthropology

Have you analyzed and understood all the steps in your assignment?  The previous section of this guide helps with that step. Typically, Anthropology 140 projects require you to select a topic, and then:

1. Explore lecture notes, your textbook, professional (scholarly) journals and books in order to understand your topic and develop an idea of the themes you will address in your paper
2. Select professional (scholarly) journal articles to use when writing about your themes
3. Annotate the articles in a bibliography
4. Integrate the articles into the full paper using a selected citation style.

Understand and focus your topic by exploring. Before selecting sources for your paper, save time and frustration by reading neutral, factual sources that give you the general picture of your topic, definitions, vocabulary and themes. Scholarly reference sources and textbooks provide this kind of generally accepted, factual information.

You have THREE options for selecting articles that will work for your research assignment.

FIRST OPTION: Known articles or journals.  If you have identified an article or two from exploring reference works (or consulting with your prof, lecture notes, textbook, etc), then you put the article title in the Library's Esearch box to locate it. 
If you have particular journal in mind (but not a specific article), then go to the library's main page, click on the tab for Journal Title search to see the locations or databases for that journal.

SECOND OPTION: Use Esearch and limit to peer reviewed anthropology journals.  Esearch is a tool that searches into all the Library databases and collections, so it is important to set limits that will screen out book reviews, dissertations and non-anthropology titles. Take these steps:

1. Go to the Library's main page, and click on the link for Advanced Esearch
2. In Advanced Esearch, put your search term in the box (for example, Cro Magnon or Peru Mummies)
3. In the next search box, type anthropology
4. Below the search boxes, scroll through the "Content Type" box and check "Journal Article" 
5. Check the option to limit to "Peer reviewed publications"
6. Press Search. Depending on your results, you may want to make further limits using the tools in the left side column of the search results.

THIRD OPTION: Use selected databases. There is no single database that collects only anthropology journal articles, but we have selected the best databases for anthropology.  Locate these databases by going to the Library's main page and clicking on the tab for "Databases" and then selecting Anthropology as a subject and pressing "Go."  For most physical anthropology topics, your best bets for databases will likely be: