Research Guides: POLS 242: Women in War and Peace (HC): Finding Journal Articles

Women and Elections

Woman voting in an election in Kinshasa in November 2011 (Source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)

Journals

Journal articles provide in-depth scholarly information. They are vetted and improved by peer review. They are usually fairly short in length and focused on discussing one specific issue. The following indexes are good places to find journal articles about political science.

Use the Find It button in these indexes to access the journal articles available in your library. If the journal is not listed in Tripod, use the Find It request form to have a digital copy of the article sent to your email address in around two to three days.

Subject-Specific Databases

Political Science Databases

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
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Indexes and provides access to journal articles in political science and related fields. This is a good way to quickly find research and analysis by political scientists.

Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) Index
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Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, government documents, and reports. Areas covered include political, economic, social and public policy issues. Covers 1915-present.

Gender Studies Databases
GenderWatch
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Offers full-text access to scholarly journals, books, and other kinds of publications. Materials focus on how gender impacts a broad spectrum of subject areas. Covers 1970-present.
Women's Studies International
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Indexes journal articles, books, and book chapters in the core areas of women's studies. Covers material published from 1972-present.

Area Studies Databases
Africa-Wide
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Offers access to multi-disciplinary information on Africa including books, journal articles, maps and music recordings. Some materials are in full-text. Covers 19th century-present.
Bibliography of Asian Studies
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Provides citations to journal articles, book chapters, and pther publications on all subjects pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia. Covers 1971-present.

DialNet
This is a virtual library of Ibero-American scholarship, hosted by the University de la Rioja in Spain. It indexes more than 11,000 journals and 8+ million documents. There are a growing number of full text articles available as content is continuously updated. All subjects covered including the social sciences.
HLAS Online: Handbook of Latin American studies
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Covers books, book chapters, articles, and conference papers published in the field of Latin American studies and edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.

Index Islamicus
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Offers citations to literature on the Middle East, Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, and Muslim minorities elsewhere. Includes citations to journal articles, books, and book reviews from 1906 to present.
Publicaciones y Revistas Sociales y Humanísticas (PRISMA)
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Covers all aspects of Hispanic studies, from research on indigenous cultures past and present to current economic indicators, politics, society, and Hispanic theater. Disciplines covered include anthropology, economics, history, literature, political science and sociology. Includes works in English and Spanish.

Databases Covering All Subject Areas

ProQuest Research Library
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Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines. You can use filters to see only scholarly or popular articles. Covers 1971-present.
Web of Science
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Find multidisciplinary scholarly articles (sciences, social sciences, and humanities). Citation searching also allows search for highly cited articles and books.

Tracking Citations Forward in Time

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
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When you connect, choose the Cited References option to begin.
Enter the author's name: e.g., sjoberg L* Last name first, First name initial only with asterisk.
Skip Cited Work box
Put the publication year in the Cited Year(s) box. In this example, 2007.
On the next screen, sort the results by Cited Work, choose the relevant results for the book title
Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics and hit "See Results."
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.
Use the search box and filters on the left to refine your results.
Note also the References link on the far right. It gives you an immediate view of the bibliographies from the new articles you have just found.
Google Scholar
You can find cited references in Google Scholar searching by article or book title or by author. For the publication titles use quotation marks for specificity. In the results, look for the link Cited by [number]. Google Scholar has the advantage of including books in its cited references in contrast to Web of Science's coverage only of journal articles.