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Politics & Government Junior Seminar (POLS 399)

Sources for research papers in Politics and Government

Databases for Scholarly Sources

Political Science Database (ProQuest)
This is a good database to use when you want to restrict your results down to JUST political science. It provides to hundreds of leading political science and international relations journals, providing full-text of many core titles indexed in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts.

  • Good for finding Articles.
  • To Limit to Journal Articles, click the checkbox under "Sources" : Scholarly Journals

Pacific Library - Boxer Search 
Pacific's library search includes millions of items, including both electronic and print material. All of our books and e-books are here, as well as about 70% of the journal articles that we have paid access to. This is the quickest way to get into sources that you can access immediately, without having to guess whether you'll be able to get the full text. Tips: 

  • Best place for finding Books. 
  • You can limit to "Full Text Only", Print Books only, Ebooks only, etc. Use the tools on the left hand.
  • You should be able to get access to most articles immediately. See more tips about getting access here.

Google Scholar

This database gathers sources from many other databases into one centralized location. It will find nearly any academic book or article that has been published. The downside is that it is so large, that the items you really want to find may be buried under dozens of irrelevant sources. Also, there may be many articles that you cannot actually open. Tips: 

  • Good for finding Articles. 
  • Are the articles you are finding too old? Change the date range using the tool on the left side:
  • If you find one really good article/book, you can find others like it by clicking on the "Cited By" or "Related Articles" links:
  • Become a Google search expert by using their advanced operators

Academic Search Premier
This is a good all-purpose database for scholarly articles. It indexes over 13,000 periodicals with coverage in the social sciences, humanities, education, physical sciences, technology, medicine, etc. Full text is available for nearly 5,000 titles.

JSTOR 
This database is especially good for topics in history, political science, English, and the humanities. Its biggest negative is that most of the sources in it were published 3+ years ago. Use the Advanced Search for best results! If you scroll down on Advanced Search page, you can pick specific topics to search within. Example: 
 

Project Muse
This database is very similar to JSTOR but it covers a slightly different set of journals. It's especially good for humanities research. The "Research Area" box on the left side lets you narrow down by subject area. Example:

Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest)
This database is an amazing resource for dissertations (which are the final papers of Ph.D. and Master's students, typically 50-250 pages long). This is a great place to find CUTTING EDGE research on recent issues. These sources are generally very difficult to find except through this database! Example:

Many More Options...

Many other specialized databases are available through the library. We have organized them according to academic field, including:

Politics & Government - MANY MORE databases listed here!
Environmental Studies
Philosophy
Sociology & Anthropology
And many more