LibGuides: GLS280: Gender & Politics Worldwide: Finding Articles

Recommended Databases

Sometimes the amount of results in the library search can be overwhelming, or you want to focus your search more to resources within a specific subject area. The following databases allow you to search directly on their platforms and often provide extra features to make searching easier and more efficient. These are some of our best databases for searching for content in political science, current events, and related fields.

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts provides citations, abstracts and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration/policy. Coverage is from 1975-present.
Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Complete provides coverage in the fields of Arts and Entertainment, Business, Communications, Education, General Interest, Health and Medicine, History, Home and Living, Literature and Writing, Politics and Government, Religion and Philosophy, Science, Social Sciences and Humanities, Sports and Leisure, and Technology. It includes access to over 9,000 full-text journals, with 7,800 of them peer-reviewed. Formats include articles, books, conference proceedings, reports and more.
ProQuest Research Library This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Research Library enables users to search periodicals for both peer-reviewed and popular information on a broad range of general reference subjects including arts, business, humanities, social sciences, and the sciences. Indexing includes citations/abstracts, full-text HTML, full-text HTML with graphics, and PDF formats. Updated daily.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides full-text PDF access to scholarly journals in Arts and Sciences and Business. The database is searchable by keyword, item type, publication title, and language, and browsable by discipline and journal issue. Each journal has an individual "moving wall" date of available content; the date range is 0-5 years previous to the current year, depending on the journal.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Project MUSE provides full-text access to current content from over 400 titles representing nearly 100 not-for-profit publishers. MUSE offers articles in full text (HTML and PDF formats), in a variety of subject areas including economics, education, film, history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, women's studies and more. Journals can be searched by title, discipline, or collection. Users can also search within the full text of articles or by subject, author, or title.

Tips for Searching Library Databases

The library's databases have different search interfaces, but they share basic search principles. Some of these principles are listed below.

It is good practice to look for the [Advanced Search] option in each database that you use. The advanced search page will usually make it very clear as to how you can control your search using Boolean search techniques, limiters, field searching, etc.

Boolean Searching

Boolean searching is the cornerstone to an effective search strategy. Boolean searching refers to searching using a combination of words and the three Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT. A best practice is to capitalize your Boolean Operators.

AND will make your search smaller. If you are retrieving too many records on your topic, try adding another search term with the operator AND.

For example: "krispy kreme" AND marketing

OR will make your search bigger. If you are retrieving too few records on your topic, try adding another search term with the operator OR.

For example: (adolescents OR teenagers)

NOT will exclude a word from your search results. If you are retrieving too many records on an unrelated topic, try eliminating a word with the operator NOT.

For example: dolphins NOT football

Phrase Searching

To search for two or more words in the exact order in which they are entered you should enclose the phrase in quotation marks " ".

For example: "obsessive compulsive disorder"

Truncation

Truncation allows you to search the root form of a word with all its different endings by adding a symbol to the end of a word. Truncation symbols vary by database (check the help screens or ask a Librarian), but are usually one of the below:

* (asterisk)
! (exclamation point)
? (question mark)

For example: advertis* will search for advertise, advertisement, advertising, advertises