Ethnic Studies Thesis Research Guide:

Databases & tricks for using them well

Contact Librarian: Miriam Rigby, rigby@uoregon.edu; 346-7202

General Tips & Tricks

"Boolean operators"

AND - finds articles that include ALL the words you connect with "and"
OR - finds even more articles because it searches for articles that contain one word and/or another
NOT – excludes articles that contain the words that follows this command "FindText" button displayed in your results – click to search for book and article holdings in our library.

"FindText" button displayed in your results - click to search for book and article holdings in our library.

Social Sciences Journal Articles

Sociological Abstracts provides access to citations and abstracts of scholarly research in sociology and related fields.

Near the top of the page, note the tab for "Search Tools"

"Thesaurus" - allows you to search for the exact subject terms ("descriptors") assigned to articles. Put in the term you are thinking of and it will give you options for more precise terms.
"History/Combine Searches" - if you have performed multiple searches, they will be stored in this location so you can return to them, reuse them, and combine multiple searches together.

Annual Reviews in Sociology are review articles on various topics in sociology written by scholars. These articles are great ways to get an overview of research on a topic as well as a reliable source of citations to important scholarship.

"Advanced Search" option - "all of these words" = AND search; "at least one of these words" = OR search; "none of these words" = NOT search, no need to use AND, OR, or NOT.
Within the Review Articles, you can click on in-text citations (in red text) to view the full citation.

Web of Science is an interdisciplinary index to articles in the sciences and social sciences, making it particularly useful for the multidisciplinary needs of Ethnic Studies researchers.

Cited Reference Search
Visual "Citation Map" - a great tool for seeing who cites whom (find the link to this within individual item records)
"Search History" stores searches so you can return to them, reuse them, and combine multiple searches together.

Anthropology Plus indexes articles and essays in all of the subfields of anthropology, from the 19th century to the present, including some sociologically and demographically focused journals.
GeoBase is the best database for finding human geography articles. This is a great option for a broader search to supplement your findings in Sociological Abstracts and Web of Science.

(Anthropology Plus and GeoBase have similar search interfaces)

"Previous Searches" stores searches so you can return to them, reuse them, and combine multiple searches together.

Literary Criticism Resources

MLA International Bibliography is the essential index for critical materials about literature, languages, folklore and film. The database provides access to over 1.3 million entries gleaned from essay collections, dissertations, monographs and over 6,000 journals. Covers 1926-present.

Literary Index allows you to search for information about authors and their works in several of the Gale reference series, such as Dictionary of Literary Biography and Contemporary Literary Criticism.

Contemporary Literary Criticism (REF Knight PN771 .C59) contains full-text articles, including book reviews and interviews, from major news sources in the United States. The volumes go by year (vol. 343 is for 2008), and are organized alphabetically by Authors' names within each.

Use Literary Index online to search for articles across all years by author.

Other Places to Search

Statistical Resources on the Web, by Grace York and her army of Library School students at the University of Michigan. This is a somewhat clunky website, but can be extremely useful as it is regularly updated and full of links to statistical sources on the internet.

Google is a great search engine to use for searching for publically available datasets.
Use Advanced Search

"Filetype:" – allows you to select a type of file such as Adobe PDF (pdf) or Microsoft Excel (xls) documents; publically available articles are often in PDF formal, publically available datasets are often in Excel format.
"Site:" – allows you to search just within a particular website, or a section of a website. This is especially powerful when combined with a "filetype:" search

Google Books and Google Scholar are useful when you are looking for digitized books or articles.

if you use these websites when you are on-campus, your results will include links to the Library Catalog

Maintained by: Miriam Rigby, rigby@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 06/19/2009