The main search box on library.yale.edu will take you to Quicksearch, search.library.yale.edu/quicksearch, our main library portal for locating information on any topic. Quicksearch combines results from the library catalogs, our articles discovery tool, special/digitized collections, and more — our goal is to improve how easy it is to discover materials. Libraries, unlike Google, are trying to display information about analog and digital resources at the same time. Creating systems that help you identify the best resources — print, archival, or digital — is very challenging. Not every print or archival item is or can be digitized.

We will use Quicksearch to go to Articles+, our main articles interface. Here, I've done a search for "sign language" AND linguistics — the quotation marks will interpret sign language as a phrase. We will see results about all sign languages, and many of the results will emphasize linguistics.

Once in the Articles+ interface, you will see articles (scholarly and popular). The filters on the left-hand side can help you narrow down your results, and this is where you can select "peer-reviewed publications only" and other limits.

The Full Text Online box will take you to the full text. Use the Quick Look feature to open up a box that displays additional information about the results. The third item in the screenshot about sign languages and corpus linguistics looks interesting. I want to find more information about it, so I will add corpus linguistics to my search: "sign language" AND linguistics AND "corpus linguistics"

What if I'm not pleased with the range of resources available? I can see from the Content Type information on the left that there may be resources I'm not seeing. I can clear the filters for magazine and journal articles while keeping "Full Text Online" to see the full range of results available to me.

Let's say that I'm interested in book chapters. I can choose the limit in Content Type and view any of these documents. 

What if I want to do a search for something else, like sociolinguistics? It's easy to modify the search. Just make sure that the search limits are the ones that you want — they usually "stick" in between searches when you are in the same browser session.

If we want, we can change to just looking for resources related to American Sign Language. Note that the search isn't case-sensitive. Frequently, experienced searchers won't capitalize terms at all unless autocorrect intervenes: "american sign language" AND sociolinguistics AND culture

We can also create nested statements with OR. Here, we are nesting an OR statement to look for two phrase variants that might come up in an abstract or chapter summary. The full search is "American sign language" AND sociolinguistics AND (culture OR "Deaf culture")

Keeping up with research teams in Deaf Linguistics and Cultural Studies is one way to find new articles as they appear. This is a short list of research centers and groups to get you started.

In some databases, like the Web of Science (which contains the Social Science Citation Index) or Scopus, you can search by author affiliation or the corresponding author's work address, which will help surface works by these groups. This is especially valuable for students seeking to intern and/or those who are preparing to find a graduate school with research teams of interest to them. (Note: If you are off-campus and want to click on the links for Web of Science or Scopus, add https://yale.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https:// before the links webofknowledge.com and scopus.com to be authenticated as a Yale user.)