Research Guides: POLS 253: Introduction to Terrorism Studies (HC): Finding Journal Articles

Terrorism Worldwide (Source: flickr)

Muslims protest terror attack on Mumbai. Photo by Anuradha Sengupta, 2008 (Source: flickr, Creative Commons license 2.0)

Journal Indexes

The databases below allow you to search for journal articles by subject. When you find a title of interest, if the full text is not immediately available (as in JSTOR and Proquest), use the Find It button to check for Haverford's holdings.

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.
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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Database of full text legal periodicals and primary documents. Includes: Law Journal Library, U.S. Congressional Documents, U.S. Federal Legislative History Library, U.S. Presidential Library and many others.
Index Islamicus
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Offers citations to literature on Islam, the Middle East and Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, and Muslim minorities elsewhere. Includes citations to journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and book reviews from 1906 to 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.
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.
RAMBI: Index of Articles on Jewish Studies This link opens in a new window
Offers citations to articles in the field of Jewish Studies and in the study of Eretz Israel. Material comes mainly from the holdings of the Jewish National and University Library. Covers 1966-present.
Women's Studies International
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Provides citations and abstracts of journal articles, books, book chapters, newspapers, dissertations and bulletins, in the core areas of women's studies. Subjects include, feminism, women of color, science, health and technology. Includes different women's studies resources. Covers 1972-present.

Journal Indexes for Regions of the World

Africa-Wide
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Indexes journal articles, essays and more.
Bibliography of Asian Studies
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Indexes articles, book chapters and conference proceedings. You can limit results by country.

HLAS (Handbook of Latin American studies)
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HAPI: Hispanic American Periodicals Index
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Includes references to material published in Latin America.

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, open the Basic Search tab to find the Cited Reference Search link 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 material citing the title you have entered.
Bonus Google Scholar includes books in its results. Web of Science is limited to journal articles only.

Subject Guide

Karen Viars

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Subjects: Africana & Black Studies, History, Political Science

Literature Reviews

Literature reviews are a particularly useful resource when doing research. They address the issues involved in a particular question and the debates among scholars. They map out the intellectual terrain succinctly and give you the major landmarks in terms of key authors and significant titles for greater understanding.

Annual Review of Political Science
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Covers significant developments in the various fields of Political Science. Literature reviews concerning terrorism include:
The New New Civil Wars (2017)
The Rise and Spread of Suicide Bombing (2015)
Terrorism and Democracy (2013)
Oxford Bibliographies Online: Political Science
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The Oxford Bibliographies Online lay out the parameters of a field and evaluate the importance of individual books and journal articles in the form of an annotated bibliography. They are valuable for identifying authoritative sources on your topic.
This volume is under development with more entries being added twice a year. Essays of interest now available include:
Terror Management Theory by Sheldon Solomon;
Geographies of Terrorism by Andrew Braden, Matthew Cobb, Alex Braithwaite;
Terrorist Financing by Michael Freeman;
International Support for Nonstate Armed Groups by Belgin San-Akca.

Dissertations & Theses
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Doctoral students go through an exhaustive literature search when writing their dissertations. They also tend to work on new questions, sometimes ones that have received very little attention from scholars before. You can benefit from the bibliographies assembled in dissertations. Many of these studies are available full-text in the Proquest database. Request others through Interlibrary loan.