POLS 5103 Research Design: Home
Starting Points
Primary Databases for Political Science/Fire and Emergency Management
The following databases are useful for finding journal articles and other research sources various aspects of political science, public policy, emergency management, etc.. Many contain full-text articles, or have links to full-text or to document delivery request forms via Article Linker (
). You will need to log in with your OSU email address and O-Key password to access these databases off-campus. Click HERE to log in.
- JSTORFull text access for over 228 scholarly journals in Political Science. Journals cover many disciplines, including African American Studies, Anthropology, Art & Architecture, Asian Studies, Biology, Botany, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, General Science, History, Humanities, Irish Studies, Language & Literature, Latin American Studies, Linguistics, Mathematics, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Slavic Studies, Sociology, and Statistics. Coverage generally ranges from 1900 to 2000, most journals have a moving wall of 3-5 years.
- Project MuseFull text access for 41 Political Science journals
- Science DirectExtensive database of technical and scientific literature from Elsevier. Contains many peer-reviewed articles on emergency management, disaster preparedness, and disaster mitigation
- ABI/INFORM GlobalBusiness database with many peer-reviewed articles on public policy, regulation, and related topics.
- Google ScholarOff campus, go through the Databases list on the OSU Library homepage to log in with O-Key and get full text of journal articles to which we subscribed online.
Secondary
- PsycINFOAn index to psychology, behavior, personality, child development, family relations, homelessness, criminology and prisons Abstracts available with many links to full-text
- Sociological AbstractsIndexes 3000 periodicals related to sociology, social work and other social sciences Indexing from 1952 - present; abstracts from 1963 - present Cited References available for all journal articles Direct links to full-text articles available for hundreds of journals
- ERICERIC stands for Education Resource Information Center, and it is our major resource for research on education and related areas.
- America: History and LifeBibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Published since 1964, the database comprises almost 400,000 bibliographic entries, covering over 2,000 US and foreign journals.
- Opinion ArchivesOpinionArchives provides searchable full-text access to several major periodicals known for their commentaries and opinion pieces on topics related to politics, culture, and the arts. These titles include American Spectator, Commentary, Commonweal, Dissent, Harpers Magazine, NACLA, The New Leader, The Nation, The National Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Coverage extends as far back as 1850.
- Military and Government CollectionThe Military & Government Collection provides current news pertaining to all branches of the military. The database contains indexing and abstracts for nearly 400 journals and periodicals and cover-to-cover full text content for nearly 300 of these titles
- Proquest CongressionalProQuest Congressional is the only site anywhere that offers a comprehensive collection of congressional documents from 1789 to the present.
- HeinOnlineHeinOnline is a premier online database containing more than 150 million pages and 150,000 titles of legal history and government documents in a fully searchable, image-based format. HeinOnline bridges the gap in historical research by providing comprehensive coverage from inception of more than 2,400 law-related periodicals.
- CompendexEngineering database for technical articles and reports
Multidisciplinary
- Proquest Research LibraryProquest is a multidisciplinary database covering magazines, journals and newspapers. Coverage begins in 1986. You'll find far better research in the social science databases listed elsewhere on this page, but you might find some more popular periodical titles here. Make sure to select 'Scholarly Journals' when you are searching.
- Academic Search PremierAcademic Search Premier is a general subject index, similar to Proquest. It does not specialize in any given discipline, it attempts to cover them all.
- BOSSSearches across many, but not all databases. Use only in combination with searches in the specific databases listed above.
OSU Library
- BOSS (Big Orange Search System)The OSU Stillwater Library, the Edmon Low Library, has a collection of over three million books. To identify a book, use BOSS.
Many print and online sources from the US governent, state goverment, international governments, and organizations such as the United Nations or World Bank are listed in our BOSS Catalog.
You may also consult the search resources on the Library's Government Documents page for additional methods of locating government sources.
Books Available Elsewhere
- WorldCatSearches major library catalogs worldwide. Search for and request items from other collections, e.g. University of Oklahoma or other major research libraries. The "Borrow from another library" link on records takes you to the interlibrary loan (ILLIAD) form to borrow books we don't have in our collection.
EndNote - free bibliographic management software that you can use to save citations into a database of references that you can insert into your research papers.
Zotero is a free, easy to use, online tool built to help undergraduates create, save, and share citations and build great works-cited lists and bibliographies
Style Sheet - Print Sources
- Style Manual for Political Science byCall Number: EbookISBN: 1878147331Publication Date: 2001-11-01In addition to providing guidance on grammar, the mechanics of writing, and APSA style, this manual offers an authoritative reference and citation system. It also covers the treatment of numbers, statistical and mathematical data, tables and figures.
