Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare

Harpers 
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Focus: Articles on politics, science, education, the arts, entertainment and business for a well-educated, politically active audience.

Mother Jones
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Focus: Articles dealing with national news, investigative reporting, commentary, the arts as well as articles on health, the environment and book reviews.

Nation 
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Focus: Economics, education, foreign policy, labor, law and other social issues, literature and the arts.

New Republic
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Focus: Articles in the format of reports and essays, with topics ranging from politics and economics to literature and cinema.

Rolling Stone
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Focus:  Popular culture especially  music and political reporting

Utne Reader: The Best of the Alternative Press
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Focus: A digest of materials reprinted from alternative and independent media.

Atlantic 
(Neutral moving toward left leaning)
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Focus: A literary magazine covering the arts, the economy, foreign affairs, political science, and technology. It has had no pay walls via its website since 2008.

Economist
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Focus: A weekly newsmagazine of world politics and current affairs, business, finance and science published in London, England.

Newsweek
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Focus: News and commentary on developments in the nation and the world.

Pacific Standard
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Focus: Public policy, administration, behavioral and social sciences issues.

Time Magazine
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Focus: National and international news, behavior, books, business, cinema, law, education, environment, modern living, music, nation, press, religion, theater, video and world.

American Spectator

American Conservative

The Bulwark

Human Events

National Review

The New American

Most research databases use a special set of terms called Boolean operators to help you narrow your search results to return only the information that is most useful for your chosen topic or research question. Here are the most common ones, with descriptions of how they will affect your search results.

AND - only returns results that contain both search terms

OR - returns any result containing either search term, or a combination of both

NOT - weeds out all results that include a certain search term

* - (wildcard) captures variations of search terms; a search for teach* would return results containing teach, teaches, teaching, teacher, teachers

"" - placing a term in quotes returns only results that include the whole phrase as typed

() - use parentheses to order your operators (which operators should the search engine pay attention to first?)

Putting it Together

Example query: ((bicycl* OR cycl*) AND inventor) NOT racing

This search would return results that include ALL of the following:

1. One or more of the following: a variation of the word bicycle, a variation of the word cycle (e.g. bicycle, bicycling, cycle, cycling, cyclist)

2. The word inventor

3. No instance of the word racing

***Some search engines have different wildcards (like the * described here) or lack them entirely. Also, some search engines, like Google, substitute - minus sign for NOT. Terms like OR, AND are fairly universal, however, as are "" and ().