LibGuides: Social Sciences: Journal Articles

Indexes and Databases

Journal Articles

Indexes and Databases bring together a number of different online journals and other resources into one search engine. Use these tools to find citations, abstracts and/or full text articles, reports and other resources on your topic. Both scholarly and popular articles may be included.

Social Sciences Abstracts
Indexes journals from a wide variety of social science disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. These fields include psychology, sociology, urban studies, etc. Emphasis is on the United States with some international coverage. Coverage is from 1994 - present
Applied Social Science Index and Abstracts
This index covers health, social sciences, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, race relations and education. It includes over 500 journals from 16 different countries including the United States and the United Kingdom. Coverage is 1987 to the present.
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences: IBSS
This database includes over two million bibliographic references to journal articles and to books, reviews and selected chapters dating back to 1951. It contains broad coverage of international material and incorporates over 100 languages and countries. Over 2,800 journals are regularly indexed and some 7,000 books are included each year.
Web of Science
Indexes 8,5000 research journals across the Social Sciences, Sciences and Arts & Humanities. Allows you to search for articles by subject, author, journal and author address as well as for articles that cite a known author or work (citation searching). Coverage is from 1945 - present. See our Guide to Using Web of Science
JSTOR
Used by millions for research, teaching, and learning. With more than a thousand academic journals and over 1 million images, letters, and other primary sources, JSTOR is one of the world's most trusted sources for academic content.
Gale Academic OneFile Select
Provides access to the full-text of more than 3,500 periodicals including more than 2,000 scholarly journals. Citations (or abstracts) are provided for an additional 1,500 titles. Coverage of a wide variety of topics in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences makes it an excellent database for the initial stages of research.
Formerly Expanded Academic ASAP.
Academic OneFile
Provides access to full-text of more than 4500 scholarly and popular periodicals with indexing for thousands more. Coverage of a wide variety of topics in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences makes it an excellent database for the initial stages of research.
ProQuest
A single search screen that provides access to multiple databases for searching literature in a number of disciplines. It is possible to search across all 50+ Proquest databases or to limit searches to subject areas including business, health and medicine, history, literature and languages, social sciences and more.
Google Scholar
A subset of regular Google, it allows users to search for articles from all disciplines. Content is heavily skewed towards scholarly and scientific information; however, humanities and social science content is present, as is non-scholarly material.

French Journal Articles

Use these indexes and databases to find journal articles in French. Both scholarly and popular articles may be included.

Érudit
Sujets: sciences humaines et sciences sociales
Types de sources: articles de revues savantes, livres, rapports de recherche, thèses et dissertations
Note: surtout des publications québécoises
Dates: varient par publication
TEXTE INTÉGRALE: oui
Francis
La base de données FRANCIS est une base de données bibliographique contenant plus d'un million de notices, couvrant les sciences humaines et sociales à l'échelle internationale. Les sujets ou bases de données qui la compose comprennent notamment : l'archéologie, la géographie, la linguistique, la philosophie, la religion et la sociologie. Les citations comprennent des articles de périodiques, des comptes rendus de congrès, des ouvrages, des rapports et des thèses de doctorat.
Repère
380 000 références d'articles de périodiques de langue française (1980- )avec le texte intégral de 18 000 articles et les adresses de 6 000 articles en texte intégral sur Internet. Répertoire général, comprend la linguistique et la langue française.

Online Tutorials

Search Tips

When searching online, various words are used to help broaden or narrow your search. Here are a few tips you should know before searching any academic database:

Boolean operators: Most internet and electronic databases follow the rules of boolean logic. Boolean logic refers to the relationships (connections or differences) between different search terms. The most common boolean operators are:

AND - used to narrow a search and establish more relevant results by linking keywords together (e.g. "behavioural" and "psychology").

OR - broadens a search and gets more results. Typically used for synonyms and words with variant spellings (e.g. "self-actualization" and "self-identity").

NOT - used to narrow a search and get more relevant results (e.g. "behaviouralism" not "humanism").

Truncation: Used to find similar words with different endings

e.g. human* searches "human and humans"

e.g. educat* searches "education", "educate", "educational" etc

Asterisk (*) searches for various different endings of a word in most databases (including York University), however LexisNexis uses an exlamation mark (!).

Other Tips

Advanced Search - This option is available on most databases, and allows you to specialize your search based on documents (books, articles, videos, etc.), date, geographic location, language, etc.

Quotation Marks - Using quotation marks will allow you to search for exact phrases. For example, searching "mental impairment" will only retrieve searches with both "mental" and "impairment" together in that order.

Refine Search - Many online databases allow you to specify your search criteria after selecting your keywords and clicking on search.

Finding a Specific Journal - If you know the name of the journal you are looking for, type it in Omni.