Global Studies Library Resources Cheat Sheet: Home

Interlibrary Loan & Carolina BLU

Interlibrary loan and document delivery system: request anything you can't access, there is no limit to number of requests and no cost to you.

Unpaywall or Open Access Button

Browser extensions that search for open access versions of articles you may find behind pay walls.

Oxford Bibliographies Online

Useful tool for identifying key readings and major theoretical frameworks and research approaches for a variety of topics.

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

  • Self explanatory, but link it to the Library when off campus for full-text access.

• CORE

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

• Semantic Scholar

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

• exaly

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

• Dimensions

  • Linked data-based aggregator. Digital Science product.

• Aminer

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

2. Library databases

• E-Research by Discipline

  • This is where all library databases live.

• Political Science databases

  • Frequently, though, of course, not always, Global Studies projects are done from this angle.

• Newspaper and news media archives

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.

• Elsevier

• Taylor & Francis

• Sage

• Wiley

• Springer

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.

In contrast to the madness of finding research articles above, there are two main tools for finding books:

Library catalog

Shows what's held at UNC and in the Triangle (you can request books from Duke, NC State and NC Central). Also pulls books from Open Research Library, Directory of Open Access Books, OAPEN and other open access content.

WorldCat and/or its paid version FirstSearch

Shows everything held in North American libraries (and beyond): you can request books via Interlibrary Loan.

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

Think Tank publications

• Chaillot Papers (European Union Institute for Security Studies)

• Chatham House Online Archive

• Columbia International Affairs Online

• Google Think Tank Search (Harvard University)

  • Searches across publications of over 1200 think tanks.

• RAND Publication Database

International Institution publications

• IMF eLIBRARY

• United Nations Digital Library

• UNdata

• World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

• World Health Organization Institutional Repository

Analysis & Commentary

• Newspaper and news archives the Library has purchased

• Alt-Press Watch

• Balkan Insight

• Ethnic NewsWatch

• GenderWatch

• New York Times Academic Pass

• Project Syndicate

NGO publications

• Amnesty International

• Human Rights Watch

Data

• Data Planet

• Statista

• USAID Demographic and Health Surveys