030:040

Course Professor: Chris Jensen

Presented on March 26, 2008

Librarian Presenter: Brett Cloyd (brett-cloyd@uiowa.edu); 335-5743

Services

• Ask a Librarian - Brett is available for assistance. Feel free to contact him with any questions about these resources. He's happy to meet in person, by phone, or email. Alternatively, you can do a quick Instant Message question with the Ask a Librarian feature for an immediate response (answered by Libraries' staff).
• Interlibrary Loan - fairly speedy delivery of books and articles not available at the University of Iowa.

Resources

• Library resouces by subject > Political Science
• InfoHawk Library Catalog . The catalog provides information on the holdings of the UI Libraries, including books, journal titles, and other media (such as dvds, newspapers, and electronic resources). You would not use the catalog to find journal articles, but instead should rely on one of the databases listed below.
• RefWorks a useful tool to help manage citations to research articles. See this Shared Folder for an example of how RefWorks might be useful to you. It also easily generates bibliographies.

Background Country Information

• European Union > member states
• OECD - Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development > member countries
• Countrywatch News, statistics and maps
• CQ Electronic Library's Political Handbook of the World .
• Election Results Archive
• Foreign Government Resources on the Web from the University of Michigan
  
• Nation Master
• Parties and Elections in Europe
• Political Parties, Interest Groups, and other movements around the world
• United Nations Statistics Division- wide number of databases with current data. Statistics can be a useful way to compare countries or get insight on a policy or political question.

Finding Scholarly Articles

These sources may contain citation information as well as the full-text for scholarly articles and books in a variety of fields. The Libraries subscribes to a large number of databases, but I believe these may prove the must fruitful for the kind of research you are pursuing. When you see only a citation, look for the button which will help you track down the article in another database or format.

Differences between a scholarly journal and a magazine

Some highlights

• PAIS . in search results, look for the Peer-Reviewed Journal tab.
• Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO). This database includes many different kinds of material and you may want to focus on journal articles when performing your searches.
• GoogleScholar Set your Scholar preferences. Choose Library Links, to include access to University of Iowa and Open WorldCat to improve utility of the service. Under Bibliography Manager, choose to import your citations into RefWorks
• EbscoHost's Academic Search Elite . limit your search to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals
• Web of Science . special database feature: see what scholars have cited the source you are considering
• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

May also be of interest

• Ingenta . includes free full-text journal articles as well as some pay for viewing.
• JSTOR . backfile of many titles found in Project Muse (last 5 years not available)
• Project Muse . journals from academic and scholarly presses. especially good for the last 5 years

Newspaper Articles

• Access World News . Current newspaper articles from around the United States and aroudn the world.
• LexisNexis Academic
• World News Connection . Newspaper articles from around the world.

Searching Suggestions

Terms

The weekly topics for your class as outlined in the syllabus are a good basis for developing search strategies. You may also find some of these terms helpful. Adding the name of your country of interest to your search will help narrow your topic and find relevant scholarship.

• civil society
• democracy
• elections
• government and politics
• non-governmental organizations, or nongovernmental organizations, or ngo
• political parties
• political science
• political sociology
• public opinion
• voting

Strategies

• Sometimes, spelling counts (labor vs. labour; ageing vs. aging)
• Learn truncation syntax in databases you use a lot (*, !, ?). politic*
• You may need to consider alternative terms (interest groups and nongovernmental organizations)
• See what terms display under "subject headings" or "descriptors". All similar articles will use the same subject headings.
• AND is similar to "all the words". Use this to narrow a search.
• OR is similar to "any of the words". Use this to broaden a search.
• NOT means "none of these words" . Use this to narrow a search.
• Add the name of a country or region to your search to focus your results.

Citation Resources

• MLA
• Turabian (similar to Chicago Manual)
• Note: RefWorks lets you choose various styles when creating your bibliographies.