Research Guides: POLS 315: Public Policy Analysis (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
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Provides citations and abstracts of journals in political science and related fields including international relations, law, and public administration/policy. Covers 1975-present.
ProQuest Research Library
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Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-present.
Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) Index
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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.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
The SSRN makes recent research in the social sciences available quickly. You can find working papers, pre-publication journal articles and conference papers available full text.

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
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Provides abstracts to economic journals, books, book reviews, dissertations, and working papers. Topics include economic theory and history, monetary theory, labor economics, international, regional and urban economics. Coverage 1969-present.
HeinOnline
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Provides full text law journals and government documents. Subscribed libraries include: Law Journal Library, U.S. Congressional Documents, U.S. Federal Legislative History Library, U.S. Presidential Library, U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Supreme Court Library, and many others. Coverage for each periodical is from the beginning issue to the most current allowed under contract.
ProQuest Education Database
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A large database of education research, including journal articles, books, reports, and other sources.
PubMed
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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.

Sociological Abstracts
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Find journal articles, essays in books, dissertations and more in the fields of sociology and related disciplines. Covers material published from 1963 to the present.

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.

See this tutorial for more information on cited reference searching. Use both Web of Science and Google Scholar below to get full results for both journal articles and books.

Web of Science Citation Databases
When you connect, open the Basic Search tab and choose the Cited Reference Search to begin.
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.

Full-text News Sources

Access World News
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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
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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.

New York Times
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For the four most recent years, use the "New York Times" link. This requires a one-time registration that will give you access for a full year to articles and online features. For articles more than four years old, use the "Proquest Historical Newspapers" link for advanced search capabilities.

Nexis Uni
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Formerly LexisNexis, find newspaper and magazine articles, news transcripts, reference works, and legal materials, including Supreme Court cases. Includes the New York Times from 1980-present.

Washington Post
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