Sociology 16: Social Research
Spring 2008
Professor Himmelstein
Finding Books
- Five College Library Catalog: Search for books in all Five Colleges, or just in one. If a book you want is not at Amherst, you can request it through the catalog for free via FCD, and it will be delivered here for you.
- WorldCat: Sometimes the Five Colleges don't have all the books you need. WorldCat searches tens of thousands of library catalogs and you can then request they be sent to you (for free) via InterLibrary Loan.
- Dissertations and theses: If you are working on a very specific or current topic, you may want to consider dissertations, or even other students' theses. Dissertations are often not available for Interlibrary Loan, but we are able (selectively) to purchase them to support advanced research. AC theses are mostly available for consultation in Archives and Special Collections.
- Buying books -- the library also buys books to support student and faculty research. You may have identified an area where we don't have enough material, or a title that we should have. Fill out a library purchase request and if the book is bought, you'll be notified when it's available.
- Browsing! It may sound random, but just looking in the stacks in the Library of Congress call numbers for sociology can be a great way to find books...
Finding Articles
Sociological Abstracts : The most important database of references to all types of publications in sociology. Use ACLinks to locate actual articles.
IBSS (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences): A great way to search several related disciplines (sociology, gender studies, psychology, etc.) at once.
PsycInfo : Index covers professional and academic literature in psychology and related areas, including sociology.
GenderWatch -- fulltext articles, gender across a full spectrum of subjects.
Ethnic NewsWatch Fulltext newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press.
Academic OneFile and Academic
Search Premier: Indexes to articles in many disciplines -- with lots of fulltext. Book
reviews as well as critical articles.
Project CORK -- over 69,000 items on substance abuse, indexed by over 400 terms. These are primarily from the professional literature and include journal articles, books, book chapters, and reports.
ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts : Covers the contents of 650 journals in many areas of social sciences.
More databases ...
Searching Individual Journals:
JSTOR provides fulltext access to backfiles (not current issues) of 47 sociology journals, including: Annual Review of Sociology and Contemporary Sociology. Unlike the most of the indexes above, JSTOR indexes each word in the fulltext of the article. (Current issues are also available online for the Annual Review of Sociology.) Some years of Contexts also available online via EthnicNewsWatch.
Getting the article or book that you want...
Journal
Locator/Citation Linker See if a journal is available
at AC; connect to electronic copies or look in library catalog for print
journals
InterLibrary Loan -- Request books not in the Five Colleges, and journal articles not at AC. Free to you!
Request we buy a book you need, and the library doesn't own.
Surveys, Polls, and Data
LexisNexis Academic Universe -- gigantic fulltext database of newspapers, great source for locating surveys.
U.S. Census Bureau is a major producer of data about American families
Statistical Resources on the Web Excellent index to U.S. statistics.
Citing Sources
Be sure to credit the sources you use for a research project -- whether printed books and journals or online texts, statistics, websites, etc.
Questions? Contact Susan Edwards (email:seedwards; voice: 542-2676)