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Global Studies Library Resources Cheat Sheet: Home

Before you start

Finding foundational readings

Finding articles

 

Because Global Studies research topics vary widely and are often interdisciplinary, the Library's discipline-specific databases may not always be the easiest entryway into finding research articles for your project (although many students do work from a political science angle and can start with Poli Sci databases).

Below are some general ideas that I use when helping Global Studies students start their projects.

1. Aggregators

Commercial aggregators (Library pays for these)

Most databases the Library pays for are either ProQuest or EBSCO products. They index articles from a variety of journals and provide full text for some of the content. It is possible to search across all ProQuest or EBSCO databases, which is useful when your topic is interdisciplinary, but can sometimes make for a longer and messier list of results.

  • ProQuest

    • Go into any ProQuest database, e.g. ProQuest Central --> Change databases (top menu) --> Select all --> Do your search

      • can limit results to peer-reviewed articles
    • Articles+

      • ProQuest product called Summon, which attempts to search across many of the databases UNC pays for.
  • EBSCO

    • Go into any EBSCO database, e.g. Academic Search Premier --> Choose Databases (top menu) --> Select all --> Do your search
      • can limit results to peer-reviewed articles
  • JSTOR

    • Repository of academic journal content.
  • Scopus

    • Elsevier product focusing on hard sciences and health sciences, but with continually increasing social sciences and humanities content.

Open

aggregators (Library pays for some of this content)

You will need to check whether the Library has access to the content you find here. Request anything you can't access through document delivery/interlibrary loan.

  • GoogleScholar

  • OpenAlex

    • A "a free and open catalog of the world's scholarly research system". May be the largest open aggregator after GoogleScholar.
  • Dimensions

    • Linked data-based aggregator. Digital Science product.
  • Semantic Scholar

    • Open and free aggregator. Allen Institute for AI product.
  • CORE

    • Aggregator of open access research papers from institutional repositories around the world.

  • exaly

    • Non-profit aggregator of scholarly literature and scientometric data.
  • Aminer

    • Search and mining service for researcher social networks. Tsinghua University product.

2. Library databases

3. The "Big 5" (Library pays for most of this content)

Five publishers have bought up a large portion of academic journals. One benefit is that you can search across journals on their websites.


Wow, that's a lot of places to check! Do I really have to search each of these? Not necessarily! It depends on your project. There is considerable overlap between some of these resources. If you are doing a comprehensive literature review, you may want to search several or all of these as due diligence.

Finding books and book-like materials

WorldCat has a subscription version FirstSearch, with more robust advanced search options, but a less modern interface. You can request most titles that UNC does not have through Interlibrary Loan.

Books will also show up in some of the databases and aggregators above.

Finding dissertations and theses

Finding defunct websites

Librarian

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Kirill Tolpygo
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Contact:
118 Davis Library, CB#3918
(919) 962-8044