Searching for articles
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Excellent starting point. Multidisciplinary article database offers access to more than 16,000 journals, magazines, and newspapers, including over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals.
- HeinOnline Law Journal Library This link opens in a new windowA multifaceted repository of online materials for legal and historical research. (W&L Law Library subscription)
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A digital archive of over 1,100 important scholarly journals. All issues of each journal are included in full-text except for the most recent 2-to-5 years, based on JSTOR's agreement with the journal's publisher.
- Scopus This link opens in a new window
Described as the largest citation-and-abstract database in the world, Scopus features broad coverage of scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences literature, as covered in about 14,000 peer-reviewed resources, as well as academic Web sites from the Scirus database. Scopus also functions as a citation-indexing tool.
- SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive coverage of sociology and its sub-disciplines, with very good coverage of related areas of study, especially politics. In addition to full-text journals, it contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895.
A starting point for articles is also the library catalog.
You also might want to try specialized databases by examining the A-Z Databases list on the library's website. On the A-Z Databases page, you can view databases by subject category. You should take a look at both the Politics and History categories.
Some recommended journals
- The American Historical Review
- Journal of American Studies
- Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
- William and Mary Quarterly
Journals in Politics
These are some of the major journals in Politics, but there are many more.
- American Political Science Review
- American Journal of Political Science
- Journal of Politics
- Political Science Quarterly
The JSTOR database includes all of these journals, albeit not the most recent years of each. You can browse or search the contents of all four of these journals by going to this list of 200+ political science journals: JSTOR political science journals
A note about JSTOR: while an excellent full-text archive of scholarly journals, always keep in mind that JSTOR does not contain the most recent 2 - 5 years of a journal. The time restriction depends upon JSTOR's agreement with the publisher. You should use the library catalog or one of the specialized databases listed the Politics and History subject categories.
If you prefer to start by searching the most recent volumes of these journals, you can start here:
- American Political Science Review
- American Journal of Political Science
- Journal of Politics
- Political Science Quarterly
Specialized Databases
These databases might be useful for your research.
- American Historical Periodicals This link opens in a new window
American Historical Periodicals offers a documentary history of the American people from the Colonial Era into the twentieth century, presenting North American thought, culture, and society through a variety of perspectives. From long-running publications to ephemeral titles, each periodical offers a cross-section of the developing United States.
- American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Covering about 1,500 periodicals, this database contains "digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from Colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century" (1740-1940), including selected years of such popular titles as Vanity Fair, Ladies' Home Journal, The Dial, McClure's, African Repository, and the Southern Planter.
This resource was purchased with funds from the Irving B. (Buck) Bricken Library Endowment Fund. - People of the Founding Era This link opens in a new windowPFE is a scholarly reference work that provides biographical information on over 25,000 people born between 1713 (the end of Queen Anne's War) and 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic War), drawn from the digitized papers of the Founding Fathers and other documentary editions of the Founding Era. It has two components. First, it provides fully searchable biographical statements that vary greatly in scope and extent. Second, it provides identically structured data for each person allowing for group, or prosopographical, study.