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POLI 371 Chinese Politics

Research Strategies

The interdisciplinariness of this course requires use of a wide variety of library resources, most often in the form of Library databases and catalogues. 

  • Library databases locate scholarly books and scholarly journal articles in all disciplines.  
  • Library catalogues locate scholarly books and ebooks in all disciplines.  
  • Databases are listed under the tabs above, e.g. Find Articles and Find Books & More.
  • The databases may be specialized databases, i.e. the Bibliography of Asian studies, or an overarching search database like Library Search
  • Databases and Library Search will search citations, including titles and authors, and may also search abstracts and full text.
  • Google and Google scholar are not comprehensive and cannot be soley relied on for academic research.  Google and other search engines need to be used to locate "grey literature" i.e. literature not published by commercial publishers, such as: 
    • Reports from government and non-governmental agencies may need to be consulted.  Check the government publications subject guides for lists of databases and search strategies.
    • Publications from special interest groups and research centers  may only be available on their websites. Go
  • Consider carefully the search terms you use in library databases and catalogues.  Controlled vocabulary (thesauri) and natural language vary across disciplines and time periods.  The words used in one database or by one group of researchers may differ from those used by other databases and researchers.
  •    Databases that aggregate many smaller database (e.g. WSI) generally do not use subject headings (controlled vocabulary) but will provide lists / indexes of keywords.  The journal content of these databases tends to change.  Use Ulrichs to locate journals within databases.
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