Some databases for finding articles

• Academic Search Premier and Expanded Academic Interdisciplinary databases from thousands of journals in the social sciences and humanities -- many fulltext.
• MLA International Bibliography Critical scholarship on literature, language, and linguistics.
• Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe Fulltext news, business and law -- cases, law reviews and statutes.
• Westlaw Campus Federal and state law, law reviews, and the legal encyclopedia American Jurisprudence and ALR. NOTE: you must accept the agreement by clicking at the bottom of the screen to enter the database.
• CSA Political Science Abstracts
• IBSS (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences)
• Contemporary Women's Issues and GenderWatch

Finding books in the Five College Catalog -- and beyond:

It's always good to start in the Four College Library Catalog. Books are a great way to get an overview of a topic, and edited works have chapters on specific topics. The easiest to find books (when you don't have the author or title) is through the KEYWORD search. You can use any words that you think may be used to describe your topic. Once you get a list of books, look through until you find one that looks good. Then look at the bottom of the record for the SUBJECT. This is the Library of Congress controlled vocabulary used by libraries in the U.S. to say what the book is "about". Controlled vocabulary is a powerful search tool, as it is the result of intellectual effort and attempts to compensate for the fact that words have many meanings -- and that the meanings change over time. The UMass Catalog is a separate search, and may uncover additional material. You can request books that are in any of the other Five College Libraries, and they will be delivered to you at your home library (Frost Library for Amherst College students, for example).

If you don't find enough books in the Five Colleges, you can search thousands of library catalogs in World Cat. You can then request books through Interlibrary Loan... but the books and articles come through the mail so it takes TIME.

Finding Articles

Articles cover many more specific topics than books. They also have the advantage of being published more quickly than books, so can respond to current research interests more quickly. And articles are shorter -- a useful point if there isn't a lot of time. One of the challenges of finding good articles on a specific topic is that unlike books, there isn't just one catalog. Instead there are many, many databases as well as paper indexes and bound bibliographies. One strategy, if you know a particular journal is key in your topic area, is just to browse through current issues of the journal (in paper or electronic). A more comprehensive approach is to use the online databases. Each of the databases indexes a set number of journals -- there is some overlap between the databases, but some journals are unique to each one. For an interdisciplinary topic, it is good to look in more than one database. We have two paths to help you pick databases -- Indexes and Databases or the Database Locator. To decide which database to use, you have to think about which academic discipline shares your approach to the topic -- sociology, religion, lingustics, political science, law, etc. Not every index is available here via computer. Some indexes are only in paper -- for example, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts: LLba (Ref P1. L5)

Finding Legal Material

Legal materials are a bit different from general scholarly publishing. The primary source of law is the court case or the statute; secondary sources are articles, books, encyclopedias. It's difficult to delve right into the primary sources -- but the legal encyclopedia American Jurisprudence and/or ALR (available via Westlaw Campus) are a good place to get an overview of the legal concepts and key cases. Law reviews are also an excellent starting point -- they explore the context and history of a particular aspect of the law and are heavily annotated with important cases and statutes. In either Lexis Nexis or Westlaw Campus you can find law reviews and then via hypertext go to the fulltext of the court case.