Welcome

This guide provides information and links to resources and services to help you with your research in Professor Danilo Mandić's course. If you have any questions about the libraries or about doing research at Harvard, please don't hesitate to ask.
Kathleen Sheehan

Resources for Background, Context & Literature Reviews

The following sources provide definitions of sociological terms, background on theories and movements in the social sciences and biographical information on important scholars.  For additional reference sources from the Harvard Library, try searching HOLLIS+ for "encyclopedias", "dictionaries" or "companion" with a keyword, such as education.

  • Annual Review of Sociology offers comprehensive collections of critical reviews written by leading scholars.
  • Web of Science published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), is a multidisciplinary database, covering the journal literature of the sciences, social sciences and arts. You can also search the databases for articles that cite a known author or work.
  • Oxford Bibliographies. Sociology presents annotated bibliographies prepared by scholars who have chosen the key sources in a subject area.

Finding Scholarly Sources

This is a selection of resources for finding journals articles. If you are interested in finding additional resources, try the All Databases section of the Library site.

Sociology and Related Disciplines

  • Sociological Abstracts is a core resource in sociology, social planning/policy, and related disciplines. It includes citations and abstracts from over 1800 journals, relevant dissertations, books and book chapters, and association papers.

  • PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) indexes the public and social policy literature of public administration, political science, economics, finance, international relations, law, and health care.

  • America History & Life  is the primary bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present, covering over 2,000 journals published worldwide.  In addition to articles, the database includes book and media reviews and citations to abstracts of dissertations. Historical Abstracts

  • Historical Abstracts is a reference guide to the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life). Over 1800 journals published throughout the world are covered in the database, including key historicaljournals from virtually every major country. In addition to articles, Historical Abstracts includes citations to books and to abstracts of dissertations completed worldwide.

  • GenderWatch is a full text database of unique and diverse publications that focus on the impact of gender across a broad spectrum of subject areas. The database provides abstracts and the full text of some 175 scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and conference proceedings, and more.

  • Race Relations Abstracts provides indexing to "essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline." Some 40,000 records are included.

Multidisciplinary

  • HOLLIS is the library's main search interface. It includes the Harvard library catalog as well as a huge (and more heterogeneous) collection of citations for a variety of materials, including articles and book chapters.
  • Web of Science, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), is a multidisciplinary database, covering the journal literature of the sciences, social sciences and the arts. You can also search the database to find out how many times an article has been cited and by whom.
  • Google Scholar enables you to search for scholarly literature, including journal articles, theses, books, preprints, and technical reports from all broad areas of research. GoogleScholar also enables citation searching.

Finding Books

At Harvard

When you are looking for books and articles on a topic, use the default search in HOLLIS, which is a keyword search. Once you have done a search, note the "facets" on the right side of the page. Selecting a facet enables you to narrow your search by language, source type, subject, etc.

Beyond Harvard

WorldCat is a catalog containing the holdings of over 45,000 libraries worldwide but largely in U.S. collections.

For books not currently available at Harvard, you make a request through Borrow Direct.

  • If one of the libraries in this network has the book, you should receive it within 4 days. 
  • If the book is not available through Borrow Direct or the item is an article, you can submit an Interlibrary Loan request to borrow it from a broader network of libraries, which takes an average of 2 weeks.

If you find an item in another library that you think the Harvard Library should own, you can submit a Collections Purchase Request.

Finding News

Factiva is a database of over 8,000 business and news publications, most in full text. Sources are in 22 languages, date back as far as 1969, and include trade journals, newswires (Dow Jones, Reuters, and others), media programs, and company reports.

Nexis Uni features  more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis--including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790--with an interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.

NewspaperARCHIVE
Thousands of historical newspapers from the U.S. The strength of this tool is the inclusion of many small town papers.

Alt-Press Watch is a full text database of the newspapers, magazines, and journals of the alternative and independent press. As a current and retrospective collection, Alt-Press Watch serves a broad spectrum of subject areas including the arts, media and popular culture, business and labor studies, education, environmental studies and ecology, global studies, history, journalism, literary and critical studies, political science, government and public policy, social science and more.

Ethnic NewsWatch is an interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish), and comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines, and journals of theethnic, minority, and native press.
 
Regional Collections
  • Africa Confidential, founded in 1960, Africa Confidential continues to provide timely news on contemporary Africa, including in-depth analysis of significant political, economic and security developments across the continent.
  • AllAfrica.com provides access to daily news stories from over 130 African publishers in English and French through direct links to its content providers, as well as both text and audio from the BBC and RFI. AllAfrica.com's staff also publish pages on business, conflict resolution, environment, the arts, books, education, media and more. 1997-present.
  • Latin American Newsstand provides full-text information in Spanish and Portuguese from 41 newspapers from Puerto Rico and 11 Latin American countries.

Multimedia Collections

  • Vanderbilt Television News Archive is a collection of network news programs recorded since 1968.
  • AP Archive is a film and video archive of The Associated Press on YouTube. The collection offers 1.7 million global news and entertainment video stories.
  • Internet Archive: TV News Archive was launched in 2012 (with content dating back to 2009), the archive is an open-access database of broadcast clips and closed caption text for search and discovery. Programs include national news broadcasts as well as local news programs. The Internet Archive provides loans of full programs on DVD.

Data Resources

For assistance with finding and using data resources and government documents in the library, please contact Diane Sredl, Data Reference Librarian and John Baldisserotto, Electronic Documents & Data Librarian, at govdoc@fas.harvard.edu.  Here are a couple of the research guides they have created to assist you with finding data:

Below is a list of a few of the data resources available to you:

  • ProQuest Statistical Insight is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts the statistical content of selected United States government publications, state government, business, association and intergovernmental publications.
  • Roper Center for Public Opinion provides access to summary-level (aggregate) and micro-level (raw) public opinion data. The Roper Center resources require users to set up individual accounts in order to gain access to the data.

Helpful Services & Tools