Searching for Philosophy Articles in Project Muse
Project Muse is a database you can use to find scholarly philosophy articles for your research position paper. It offers full text articles from "over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers." Like Academic Search Premier, this database is available through the UMUC Library homepage.
Here is a search for the topic "Will Cloning Harm People?"
This search retrieved 301 articles.
Here is an example of one of the retrieved articles. This contains all the information needed to cite the article:
To read the article, either click on the article title or the "View in PDF link." Note the Subject Terms that you can use to retrieve additional related articles.
There are several ways to determine whether this article is scholarly and if you would want to cite it for your philosophy position paper. Clicking on the full text shows numerous citations or references at the end of the article; this indicates the author has conducted an extensive amount of research and cited his sources. A search for the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory indicates that this is a refereed or peer-reviewed publication. The journal is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, which is affiliated with a distinguished institute of higher learning. Finally, a Google search of LeRoy Walters indicates that he is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. You might also note that the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal is a philosophy journal--one that is suitable to use for your position paper.
Creating More Focused Searches
The preceding search retrieved 301 articles. You can, however, create searches that are more focused and retrieve fewer results. One way to do this is by focusing on a specific subject area, such as philosophy:
Instead of 301 articles, 152 were retrieved by restricting the search to the philosophy subject area:
You can also use the pull-down menus next to the search boxes to limit results. Here is a search conducted using "All Fields except text." This is a narrower, more focused search than one using "All Fields":
This search retrieved 16 results--considerably fewer than the other searches:
If you are interested in searching for articles by a particular author, you can use the Article Author field:
This tutorial should get you started with searching for philosophy articles in Project Muse. If you have any questions about using this database, please ask a librarian.