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ANTH 691H: Honors Thesis Project Seminar: Books & Articles

Starting Your Search

You can search the library’s catalog through our website here: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/

You can find links to individual databases that may be helpful on the E-Research by Discipline page of our website

Searching for Sources Effectively

Follow the Bibliographic Trail: One proven method for gathering reliable information efficiently is to follow the citations or references from one source to another. The author's bibliography can lead you to other sources on the topic
Subject Headings: If you find an interesting title in the library catalog or article database, open the record and scroll down to alternate Subject Headings. Click on the link and it will take you to addional materials with the same subject/topic.
Identify keywords: Before searching the Library Catalog or other databases, take a few minutes to write down all the words that describe your topic. Use these words and synonyms in keyword searches.

Subject specific databases

AnthroSource
Developed by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), AnthroSource provides over a century publications online. It has current issues of the AAA's most critical peer-reviewed publications and archives of all AAA journals.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: late 19th century - present
Ethnic NewsWatch
A full-text collection of newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. This collection of articles, editorials, columns, reviews, etc. provides a broad diversity of perspectives and viewpoints.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: 1960 - present
GenderWatch
Full-text collection of international journals, magazines, newsletters, regional publications, special reports and conference proceedings devoted to women's and gender issues.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: mid 1970s-present
Historical Abstracts
Covers the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada) and indexes nearly 2,300 journals in over 40 languages.

Note: Limited to 6 users at a time.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: 1953-present
ProQuest Social Science Database
Research covering topics in sociology, social work, anthropology, and politics.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
PsycInfo
Database from the American Psychological Association covering the academic research and practice literature in psychology and related disciplines (medicine, education, social work, etc.) from over 60 countries in more than 29 languages. It provides indexes to journals, dissertations, book chapters, books, technical reports, and other documents from 1887 to the present.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: 1887 - Present
PubMed
Database of biomedical literature from the National Library of Medicine covering journal articles about medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, biology and public health from 1950 to the present; multiple mobile apps available, provides access to MEDLINE, etc. Includes links to full text of UNC-CH's electronic journal subscriptions.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: 1957-present
Sociological Abstracts
Database covering over 2500 journals in sociology, both theoretical and applied, and related disciplines including anthropology, economics, education, medicine, community development, philosophy, demography, political science, and social psychology. Articles in 30 different languages from about 55 countries.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: 1963-present

General and multidisciplinary databases

Academic Search Premier
Find information on academic areas of business, social sciences, humanities, general academic, general science, education and multi-cultural topics; resource provides access to major popular and scholarly journals with many full-text articles.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: Indexing, 1975-present; Full-text, 1975-present
Articles Plus
Index to hundreds of millions electronic resources, including journal and newspaper articles, e-books, dissertations, and media in campus library collections.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
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.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.

Google Scholar provides the "cited by" feature which traces an article's topic from the time of publication forward.The cited by link will show other articles that have cited this resource. When combined with an article's bibliography, you are then able to locate a project within a scholarly conversation. Be sure to configure your Google Scholar account so that you gain full access to articles provided by the University Libraries.

JSTOR
Provides an image archive of important scholarly journal literature in nearly all the humanities and social sciences disciplines, international and foreign areas studies, and many of the sciences. UNC patrons have access to extensive retrospective holdings of hundreds of journals, starting with the first issues. Excludes the most recent 2-5 years of currently available journals.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: Varies. Excludes most recent 2-5 years of currently available journals.
Scopus
A large citation and abstracting database providing comprehensive coverage of the peer-reviewed journal and conference literature, with links to full-text where available through the library; includes scientific, technical, medical, social science and arts and humanities disciplines and indexes over 20,500 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers including over 340 book series. Like Web of Science, Scopus allows researchers to perform citation searches to see how many times a work has been cited, by whom, and to rank searches by times cited, for the period 1996 -present, as well as its curated index of over 375 scientific web pages and over 24 million patents.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.

Anthropology review articles, handbooks, and bibliographies (good for theory, background, and context)

Reviews of research are essays which summarize what has been published about a given topic in recent years.The most important source for such reviews in anthropology is the Annual Review of Anthropology. The titles below which begin with the word "companion" often contain useful overviews of research.

American Anthropologist
See in June issues of American Anthropologist. Since 2009, each June issue of the American Anthropologist includes a series of articles which present useful overviews of research for the year in broad subfields of anthropology(archaeology, biological, linguistic, practicing, and sociocultural).
Annual Review of Anthropology
The Annual Review of Anthropology covers significant developments in the subfields of anthropology, including archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics and communicative practices, regional studies and international anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology. The Annual Review of Anthropology synthesizes the large amount of primary research literature and identifies important contributions to the field. The Annual Review brings together expert Editorial Committees to facilitate meetings where members can discuss trends in each field and select relevant topics for review. Authoritative authors are then invited to submit reviews on the chosen topics.
Routledge Handbooks
Routledge Handbooks (e.g., a general companion to anthropology research and contemporary anthropology and handbooks on medical, urban, environmental, and business anthropology)
Sage Encyclopedia of Anthropology
Theory in social and cultural anthropology : an encyclopedia
Wiley Online Library
(e.g., companions to medical, political, organizational, and urban anthropology, and anthropology of the body and embodiment as well as the anthropology of various world regions)

Oxford Bibliographies Online
Provides sophisticated online recommendations to the core scholarship on a subject as determined by experts in the field. Each module constitutes a convenient and comprehensive introduction to the essential body of literature that has shaped research on a topic. At the click of a mouse, you therefore have 24/7 access to expert recommendations that have been rigorously peer-reviewed and vetted to ensure scholarly accuracy and objectivity.

Each OBO subject database allows you to identify the core authors, works, ideas, and debates that have shaped the scholarly conversation so you can find the key literature. All the bibliographic essays have been peer-reviewed, and the specific entries are linked to full-text content available through the web or the UNC Library. The "My OBO" feature also allows you to create a personalized list of citations.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill student, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users

The Very Short Introduction Series from Oxford University Press (various print and ebook copies)

Very Short Introductions is a book series published by the Oxford University Press. The books are concise introductions to particular subjects, intended for a general audience but written by experts. Most are under 200 pages long.

Cambridge Companions (online)

A series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.

Dissertations

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global
Indexes US dissertations from 1861 with full text available from 1997; masters theses covered selectively including some full text. Citations for dissertations from 1980 include 350-word abstracts, while masters' theses from 1988 have 150-word abstracts. Selectively covers dissertations from Great Britain and other European universities for recent years.

In addition to this database, the full text of the majority of UNC theses and dissertations from 2006, and all beginning in 2008, are freely available electronically from the UNC Library: Dissertations | Theses

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: 1861 to present

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global can provide useful bibliographies and models for structuring your own work.

WorldCat

WorldCat
OCLC's WorldCat is the world's largest union catalog containing of millions bibliographic records for items in the collections of thousands of libraries from many countries. This database includes all the records cataloged by OCLC member libraries in several hundred languages.

Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
Coverage: Before 1000 B.C. - present

Ethnographies in Davis library

Library guide on Ethnographies