You can use an Article Database to find journal, magazine, and newspaper articles on your topic. 

National Centers for Enviornmental Information

Academic Search Complete

CountryWatch

SAGE Premier Collection

JSTOR

Los Angeles Times, 1881-1988 (Historical)

Los Angeles Times, 1985-present (Current)

Historical Statistics of the United States

GeoBase

ProQuest Newsstand Includes access to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal

ScienceDirect

GreenFile

• Use a database that indexes peer-reviewed journals, such as Social Sciences Full Text.
   
• On the Search screen in any database, click the option (if offered) to limit results to "Scholarly/Peer-Reviewed Journals."
  
  
• Scan the abstract of any article to identify words typically used in original research, such as "methods," "survey," "data," "results," "findings" or "conclusions." If the abstract includes some combination of these terms, there's a good chance that it is of scholarly or peer-reviewed nature.
  
  
• Still unsure if the article comes from a peer-reviewed journal?  Identify the name of the journal in which the article was originally published, and find the publication's home site on the Internet.  Look for information "About" the journal and its editorial standards.  If the journal says that submissions are reviewed by an editorial panel of the author's peers, then it's a peer-reviewed journal!

• Use the "Advanced Search" option within an online database.
  
  
• Identify and brainstorm the key words and concepts relevant to your search--usually noun concepts and their synonyms.
  Example: If you're researching "suburban" regions, related terms may be "suburbs", "suburbia", or "rural".
  
  
• Use Boolean operators to link key words for searching. 
  To narrow a search to an exact topic, link major concepts with the Boolean operator "AND."
  Example: If searching for information on different aspects of cultural geography in California, search for...
  
  • "California" AND "landscape"
  • "California" AND "environment"
  • "California" AND "cultural geography"
  
  To expand a search to retrieve more results, link synonyms or related concepts with the Boolean operator "OR."
  Example: If searching for information on urban growth, search for...
  
  • "urban" OR "municipal" OR "metropolitan" AND "growth" OR "development" OR "planning"
    

• Use truncation to search for all variations of a key word.
  Example: If searching for information on the development of a specific geographic location, search for "develop*", typing an asterisk or star symbol (*) at the end of the root "develop".  This will find items that mention "development", "developing", "developers," and "developed," all of which could be relevant search terms. 
  

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