Library Guides: SOC 400W : Senior Research Seminar: Find Books and Articles

In the Libraries

Catalog (Penn State University Libraries catalog) This link opens in a new window
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.

General Resources

LionSearch This link opens in a new window
an integrated search of books, e-books, research articles, newspaper articles, and other publications.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
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.

Tips: Google Scholar & Reading Scholarly Articles

Choose Settings on the Google Scholar default search page.

Choose Library Links from the left menu, then search Pennsylvania State University [Note: searching Penn State will not work].

Click the Save button to retain your preferences.

Now, if the Google Scholar search includes results that are available in Penn State Libraries' full text databases, a link for Get it!@Penn State will appear.

Click on the Get it!@Penn State link to display options for obtaining the full text from Penn State Libraries' subscriptions

How to Read (and Understand) a Social Science Journal Article
This is an excellent 3 page article written by Frederique Laubepin for the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Subject-Specific Databases

Criminal Justice Abstracts This link opens in a new window
a scholarly database for research articles and book chapters.
Provides abstracts of articles from the major journals in criminology and related disciplines, as well as books and reports from government and nongovernmental agencies. For each document, an informative summary of the findings, methodology, and conclusions is provided. Topics include crime trends, prevention projects, corrections, juvenile delinquency, police, courts, offenders, victims, and sentencing.
PsycINFO (via ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
a scholarly database for research articles and book chapters.
PsycINFO provides access to international literature in psychology and related disciplines. Unrivaled in its depth of psychological coverage and respected worldwide for its high quality, the database is enriched with literature from an array of disciplines related to psychology such as psychiatry, education, business, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, law, linguistics, and social work. Nearly all records contain nonevaluative summaries, and all records from 1967 to the present are indexed using the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
a scholarly database for research articles and book chapters.
CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,700 serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Records added after 1974 contain in-depth and nonevaluative abstracts of journal articles.
EconLit This link opens in a new window
Database covering literature in economics since 1969.
EconLit provides citations, with selected abstracts, to the international publications on economics since 1969. EconLit covers a broad range of document types, including journal articles, books, dissertations, and articles in collective works.

Topic Research Worksheet
This document is an example of a worksheet you could use to document your concepts and keywords for you topic.

ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection This link opens in a new window
A collection of social science scholarly databases published by Proquest.
Academic Search Complete (Ebsco) This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Complete allows you to search over 40 subject indexes at one time. It can be a useful interdisciplinary tool in a smaller pool of resource then GoogleScholar.
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.