Finding Law Review and Law Journal Articles
Whenever you are trying to find a pdf of a law review or law journal article, the most valuable resource will be HeinOnline's Law Journal Library. Generally, you can drop an appropriately formatted journal citation in the search bar at the top of the screen and retrieve the article that way--though if this does not seem to work, you can also always use the citation information to browse into the journal article by navigating into the Law Journal Library, the specific publication, the specific volume number, and the starting page number.
Finding Non-Law Scholarly Articles
If you are collecting material and you need scholarly articles that fall outside the subject scope of HeinOnline (e.g. any non-law publications), you will need to use the general Penn Libraries' resources to obtain copies of the articles. The Penn Libraries have an extremely robust set of subscriptions and a relatively intuitive interface that should make it easy to retrieve your materials.
Generally there are two strategies for pulling articles from Penn Libraries: (1) Using Articles+ to retrieve articles using the title; or (2) Finding coverage of the journal in the Penn Libraries catalog. The Articles+ strategy is typically easier, but can occasionally miss things that you could find using the second strategy. For that reason, the two strategies complement each other and should be used in tandem.
The default search bar on the Penn Libraries' homepage runs your search across both the catalog and Articles+, which is a separate resource that searches within the libraries' many subscriptions to find items at the article level (in contrast, the FRANKLIN catalog is only searching at the publication level--so you could find the Journal of American History, but not an article therein by searching the catalog). For best results, try searching the article's title in quotation marks in Articles+.
If the Articles+ search does not work or produces too many results to navigate, the second strategy is to search the FRANKLIN catalog for the title of the journal or publication to see what Penn's subscriptions cover and to help you identify which database is likely to include the article you need. It is important to pay close attention to the coverage scope in the catalog record. Sometimes recent volumes are kept under embargo ("Most recent 1 year(s) not available"), or the back catalog may not be complete.
Here is an example of the coverage for The Journal of American History (as of 8/20/21):
Once you identify and connect to a database that should include the article you are seeking, you should be able to use the database's search functionality to look for the title or browse to the specific volume and page from the citation information.
Finding News Articles
If you are having trouble locating a news source in Westlaw or Lexis, the best resource for finding news articles through Penn Libraries is their American Newspapers Research Guide. It also may help to run a title search for the newspaper in the FRANKLIN catalog to see a catalog record similar to the example above for the non-law scholarly journal.
