User:Guettarda/RefDesk Q

Database tools for social sciences

What database tools are most popular for searching the literature in history and politics? (Access to a Research university library) Guettarda 04:55, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, it depends on what literature you want to search, and how up-to-date you need to be. I'll try to break down the options I know about.:
 * JSTOR is of course the major single online repository of journal articles in history, but it lacks several major journals and does not come all the way up to the present.
 * I actually find Google Scholar helps me find a lot of recently-published things when I do my research.
 * Some people use Lexis-Nexis catalogs but I've never found them useful (except for their "Congressional Universe" catalog, which is really wonderful if you are doing anything related to congressional testimony).
 * As for general catalogs, the RLG Union Catalog is a good repository for citations of social sciences material, both articles and books, and I believe have a number of specialized sub-sets (I know there is a version of it which is just for work related to the history of science, RLG Eureka, for example).
 * If you are looking for copies of any specific rare works in the U.S., it is hard to beat WorldCat FirstSearch.
 * The "Historical Abstracts" tool of ABC-CLIO database can also be somewhat useful for looking at scholarly historical work.
 * And for my own work, I get an immense amount of use out of ProQuest's databases &mdash; full text searches of thousands of issues of many newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), as well as many more obscure sources, among other things.
 * There are probably others out there, but those are what I use; but honestly, you probably don't need all of those. Through JSTOR and Google Scholar I can usually get a number of articles on any given topic, which I can then mine for interesting references, which can lead me to all sorts of other sources, and so on and so on. But you can do a tremendous amount online these days with the databases, it is really amazing and makes it a lot less like the hit-or-miss that it apparently used to be not long ago. Feel free to leave me a message on my talk page if you have any more specific questions about using these sources, I use some of them every day. --Fastfission 11:41, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * An additional page which might be of use (which I just now discovered) is List of journal search engines. I want to also note about Google Scholar: it is free, but if your research library has its own log-in, it will often let you automatically view the articles of many of the other online journals (most current journals have their own online holdings, sometimes through their publishing house, i.e. Blackwell-Synergy, which can be a real pain to finding individual log-ins and then re-finding the journal issue you are looking for, etc.). --Fastfission 11:54, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I find Google Scholar a little limited, and unfortunately it doesn't index Jstor (since it has a better search algorithm, by the look of things). I was thinking of something along the lines things like ERIC (for education) or Biological Abstracts.  What's the equivalent for history and politics?  Guettarda 14:43, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Beyond "Historical Abstracts", I'm not sure there is much else currently. If there is, I don't know about it, and haven't heard about it. Things are still a bit unorganized when it comes to historical research and databases. I don't know what political science people do (I'm not sure they do as much research as historians, but that's probably just my bias telling me that). In any event, I've never had a historical project that did not involve a bit of legwork and serendipity, though you can get quite a lot of things online these days. --Fastfission 21:39, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)