Philosophy

If the O'Malley Library does not have what you are looking for, you can use  Interlibrary Loan (ILL) to get books and periodical articles from other libraries. It can take up to two weeks to receive your material.

For books not in our catalog, if you use the "Request this from Interlibrary Loan" button on the book's page, then information about the item you want us to borrow will be transferred over to your ILL request.

For articles, if you use the "Request this from Interlibrary Loan"  button for items where full text was not found in our collection, then information about the item you want us to borrow will be transferred over to your ILL request.

If you have a citation and want to find the full-text article, this is the easiest way to do so:

• Identify the journal title and publication year.
• Go to the library’s Journal List and type the journal title.
• A list of databases will appear where you can locate the journal, followed by a date range.
• Select the date range that includes your specific article and click on that database.
• You will be brought directly to a listing of years available for the journal.
• Select the year, volume & issue of your citation.

Here are some basic tips for reading (and understanding!) an academic article
.

• Look at the structure of the article. Most academic articles, particularly those reporting study data and findings, are structured in a similar way:

Abstract (summary of the whole article)
Introduction (why they did the research)
Methodology (how they did the research)
Results (what happened)
Discussion (what the results mean)
Conclusion (what they learned)
References (whose research they read)

• Read the abstract and conclusion first, as these have the main points.

• Read the discussion next. This will give you a longer report on the findings and their implications.

• At this point, if you're sure the article has what you need, start at the beginning and read the whole thing through, taking notes as you go.

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