Use databases to find articles on your topic. Some databases will have the full text of the entire article available within the database, others will only have a citation for the article. Use the Find-It button to determine how to access the full article when there is no electronic full-text. Read more about the Find-It Button and Understanding Scholarly Communication below, after the list of databases!

Here are some databases that may be useful for political science topics:

Multidisciplinary/Newspapers:

Academic Search Premier - a multidisciplinary database containing both scholarly and popular sources, many of which have full-text available. ASP is a good place to start your research. Use the FindIt button to locate articles that are not available full-text.
Lexis-Nexis Academic - a great source for full-text world news and legal information.
National Newspapers - a source of U.S. news from major papers including The New York Times and The Washington Post
JSTOR - a huge, wonderful database of scholarly communication from a wide variety of disciplines, including Political Science. All of these sources are full-text, but the newest documents are 3-5 years old.

Subject-Specific:

America: History and Life - for topics related to American history.
American State Papers, 1789-1838
Columbia International Affairs Online - for international affairs topics.
CQ Weekly - Congressional Quarterly's magazine on government, commerce and politics.
Business Source Premier - EBSCO database that focuses on business topics.
EconLit - for economic-related topics.
ERIC - Education-related topics.
GEOBASE - Worldwide literature on geography, geology, and ecology.
Health Source: Consumer Edition - might be useful for health policy-related topics.
Social Sciences Abstracts - covers all the social sciences. It's an EBSCO database, same as Academic Search Premier, so the interface will look familiar. There are some full-text articles; for others, use the FindIt button.
U.S. Congressional Serial Set,1817-1980

The Find-It Button

It's a bit like magic, really. The Find It button does three things:

Looks in all of our databases to see if the document you want is available full-text in another of our databases. If so, it links you to it!
Links you to the library catalog when we have the item you want in print or microform.
Links you to ILLiad (interlibrary loan) so you can borrow the item from another library if we don't have access electronically or in print.

The Find It button is YOUR FRIEND!!!

You can also use the Citation Linker, another fabulously cool tool. It is useful when you are reading an article and it cites another article that looks like it would be super useful for your research. You plug in the citation information for that article and can find out how to access it, whether it be electronically, physically in the library, or through Interlibrary Loan. It works the same way as Find It, but you don't have to be in a database.

Learn more about the Citation Linker!

Understanding Scholarly Communication

Many times, instructors insist that you use scholarly sources for your papers. What does that mean? Check out this handy dandy chart for the details!

Here are the basics:

Popular Magazines:

glossy, pretty pages with lots of advertisements and pictures
written by hired reporters for a general audience
short, easily read articles

Scholarly Journals:

somewhat dull looking - very few pictures or advertisements
written by experts in the field and reviewed by other scholars before publication
long articles with citations and bibliographies at the end

Why should you use the library and not just use Google to find some good websites?

Most of the time, scholarly publications are not available to the general public, nor are they available for free on the internet. Individuals or organizations (such as a library) subscribe to these publications. Because subscriptions are expensive, many choose to access this content through libraries.

Often, content from scholarly journals is indexed in databases that the library subscribes to. The content is on the web, but it is not accessible unless you are affiliated with the institution who is subscribing. It isn’t the same thing as just finding a website through a regular Google search. Sometimes the full text of the article is available through the database; other times it is only a citation to the article and you will need to find the print version of the article in the library or order the article through interlibrary loan if we don’t subscribe to it.

So, basically what I'm saying is that the only way you can access this scholarly information for free is by using the library databases!

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The librarian liaison to Political Science is Krista Knapp,
kmknapp@salisbury.edu | 410-677-0118