Use The CAT when you are trying to determine if the Penn State Libraries own a specific book, journal title, or video. It is often faster than finding things through LionSearch which is best for broad-based subject searching
This is the online catalog of materials owned by Penn State Libraries. All formats (books, journals, audiovisuals, maps, recordings, etc.) are included. Circulation status for individual items is also provided. Coverage: Presently contains about 7 million records. Updates: Continuous up-to-the-minute as new records are added.
Google Scholar can be a useful resource and complements LionSearch.
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.
A general, all-purpose database that will yield high-quality journal articles in a wide range of fields.
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format.
Focused specifically on the field of political science, this database can be very helpful.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts is building on the merged backfiles of Political Science Abstracts, published by IFI / Plenum, 1975-2000, and ABC POL SCI, published by ABC-CLIO, 1984-2000. The database provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration / policy. The serials list of the new database is actively under construction, with a focus on expanding international coverage. As of February 2004 approximately 1,432 titles are being monitored for coverage; this list will continue to grow.
An excellent source of scholarly articles, it also allows you to do citation tracking.
Web of Science provides access to: the Science Citation Index Expanded 1900-present; the Social Sciences Citation Index 1956-present; and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index 1975-present. Web of Science indexes articles from thousands of journals and also indexes the citations used in those articles, thus allowing the user to see which papers have cited a core paper, and how many times a paper was cited in a given time period. Covers published content is almost every discipline.
Also consider approaching your research question not from a political perspective but from a subject angle. For example, if you are looking at religion in politics, consider using a database focused on religion, for issues of ethnicity, use a database that specializes in ethnic research. Libraries' subject guides will provide information about subject-specific resources.
One of the best general news sources. Includes content from international newspapers - for a different perspective on American politics.
This link allows you to limit your search to Nexis Uni’s news collection, without the law and business collections mixed in. If you want to search the entire Nexis Uni collection (including law and business), select the “Nexis Uni” link instead.