A guide to better navigate journal articles
We have all faced our computer screens blankly in the dead of night, shuffling through scholarly articles to find ones that fit our thesis, fighting for our lives to meet the deadline by huffing copious amounts of caffeine. This article will serve as a guide to help you better navigate the intricate world of academia and how to research for your academic papers more efficiently.
The obvious elephant in the room is JSTOR, BRAC University’s officially partnered database of journal papers. More recently, BracU discreetly cut off its partnership with JSTOR, rendering their database inaccessible to students. However, being a little cheeky will let you access articles like nothing has changed.
The key is not to login to JSTOR using your BracU G Suite. Being logged in will only bring up free-access articles, which are on the lower end of quality. Therefore, search using relevant keywords – or if you know your stuff, the article name itself – while being logged out. Open the links in a separate tab and you’ll see they are locked behind paywalls. Simply login to JSTOR
using your g suite on each tab, and click ‘read online.’ The article will open, and a counter will appear on the top of your screen, showing the number of free article views you have remaining. Users get 100 views each month. If this is too much work, “sci-hub,” “z-library,” and “Anna’s Archive” are some alternatives which are quite safe for users.
Now that you have your sources, how can you write the paper itself without falling into an existential crisis? What many students fret over is finding relevant journal articles to look for a thesis. However, if you have been following your lectures, you will already have one. In that
case, you can simply start writing the paper blind. About halfway through you can start skimming through articles that agree with your thesis. This way the sources will back up your claims, rather than you tailoring the paper around what scholars say. Unless you’re an insufferable contrarian of course, in which case you will have to resort to writing around research gaps of articles.
