Best way to research journal articles.

Landon Brake

Hello everyone! I have been a logos user for a long time but something i have yet to learn to use well is the search function. What i am looking for is what is the best way to find material in journal articles when I have 100s. Specifically say I am researching exodus chapter 1, not every journal article has exodus one in it as it could be over a specific hebrew word or it could be on a topic like moses, joseph, archeology ect. Is there a best way if I want to narrow my journal articles to anything pertaining to stuff in exodus 1 to get all the results. Hopefully that makes sense.

Justin Gatlin

Interesting question. I think that it would be really challenging because you don't want to find every journal article that references any of the words in your chapter or that talks about the Israelites. It would be overwhelming to the point of being useless. Just putting Exodus 1 into the passage guide or the Factbook gives me 11 journal articles, and following the footnotes in those would probably give me 50 more. A search for Exodus 1 against my journals returns 811 articles.

Screenshot_20250501-235351.png

Instead, I would start by putting Exodus 1 into the Factbook, reading those articles, and using the "interesting words," people and events sections of Factbook to find other ideas of things to research. A good search starts in your brain: what exactly do I want to know? If the answer is, "everything interesting about Exodus 1" then a broad idea is going to lead to a very broad search. But starting with a tool like Factbook can be stimulating enough to ask better questions, which will give you better answers.

Smart search really shines here since you can restrict it to a journals collection: