Research Guides: POLS 316: Race, Poverty, and the U.S. Welfare State (HC): Articles

Good Starting Points

Journal articles and similar periodical publications provide current information on policy issues. The following indexes are key sources for finding periodical literature.

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Provides citations and abstracts of journals in political science and related fields including international relations, law, and public administration/policy. Covers 1975-present.
Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) Index
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, government documents, statistical compilations, committee reports, intergovernmental, and private organizations reports. Areas covered include political, economic, social and public policy issues. Covers 1915-present.
ProQuest Research Library
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Provides better coverage of recent events than the two political science databases above.

Full-text News Sources

New York Times
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
For the two most recent years, use the E-Journals link for the most readable version. The FindIt page includes the username and password.
Washington Post
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window

Access World News
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Newspaper collections from NewsBank provide full-text articles from the electronic editions of record for nearly 8,000 newspapers around the globe. Database covers 1977-present.
Ethnic Newswatch
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Find articles from newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press in America. Searchable in both English and Spanish, with titles in both languages. Articles from 1959-present.
Nexis Uni
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Full-text of thousands of newspapers, magazines, news transcripts, reference works, and legal materials.

Discipline-specific Indexes

These indexes are particularly good for accessing the scholarly literature of specific disciplines, i.e., articles written by economists, lawyers, sociologists, etc.

EconLit
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Provides abstracts to economic journals, books and working papers concerning all aspects of economics. Coverage 1969-present.
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive database of education research, including journal articles, books, reports, and other sources.
Also freely available through www.eric.ed.gov.
PubMed
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Free database of biomedical and related life and behavioral sciences journal articles. Includes MEDLINE index and links to PubMed Central open access articles when available.
Social Services Abstracts
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Find scholarly journal articles and dissertations in the areas of social work, social services, and social policy. International in scope.
Sociological Abstracts
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Find journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations and conference papers in the fields of sociology, social work and related disciplines as far back as 1963. Includes Social Services Abstracts journals.

U. S. Law Reviews
Journals dealing with legal and political issues that are published by law schools. LexisNexis makes all law review articles available full text.

Cited Reference Indexes

Usually researchers find more sources by looking at the footnotes in an article or book, but these will always be older than the publication you have in hand.
Citation indexes like the Web of Science (which includes sections for the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Science) are set up to search for sources cited in the footnotes of journal articles as soon as they become available. This allows you to find newer articles which cite the books and articles you already know are key for your topic. By relying on connections between authors rather than subject words and by moving forward in time, citation searching can open up new avenues of research.

Web of Science Citation Databases
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
When you connect, open the Basic Search tab and choose the Cited Reference Search.
Enter the author's name: Last name first, First name initial only with asterisk.
Skip Cited Title box.
Put the publication year in the Cited Year box.
Under Current Limits, open Citation Databases and uncheck Science Citation Index and Conference Proceedings Science.
On the next screen choose the relevant results based on the Cited Work titles.
The results screen shows the newest articles first. Most records include a summary of contents, so that you can determine how relevant they may be for your research.
Google Scholar
To search for cited references in Google Scholar, enter the title of the article or book in quotation marks.
In the results list, check the link Cited by [number] for both books and journal articles which cite the title you have entered.