Research Methods for History: Articles and Books
Bibliographic Databases
The two most prominent bibliographic databases for history are America: History and Life (for history focused on North America) and Historical Abstracts (for history relating to the rest of the world). These databases index journal articles, dissertations, and book reviews to an almost exhaustive degree and include links to full text when available through UNC Libraries subscriptions. For items where full text is not available online, ILL can provide a scan of our print copy or obtain a scan from another library.
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America, History and LifeAn index for North American history consisting of journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations & book reviews. America, History and Life is a complete bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. (Source: vendor website.)
Note: Limited to 6 users at a time. -
Historical AbstractsCovers 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. -
History Search: America, History & Life/Historical Abstracts
Allows you to search America History & Life and Historical Abstracts either together or separately. America History and Life, is an index for North American history consisting of journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations & book reviews. Historical Abstracts, covers the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada).
Other Resources for Secondary Scholarship
JSTOR is a widely used, full-text database of scholarly literature. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global can provide useful bibliographies and models for structuring your own work. Google Scholar provides the "cited by" feature which traces an article's topic from the time of publication forward. 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.
We have additional History databases, as well as hundreds covering other fields, on our E-Research by Discipline pages.
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JSTORProvides 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.
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses GlobalIndexes 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 -
Google ScholarEnables 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.
Finding Books
Start with a keyword search in the catalog. Once you have located a relevant item, you can look at the Subjects in the record and follow those links to find related books.
You can also refine your results by using the facets on the left side of the screen.
- Topic: Nations, Borders, and Identities
- Topic: Atlantic Slave Trade
Adjust the facet on the left side of the screen to expand your search to Duke, NC State, and NCCU Libraries. To expand your search even further, try searching WorldCat.
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WorldCatOCLC'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.
Interlibrary Loan
Can't find the article, book, or report you need at our library? You can request it from another library through interlibrary loan.
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The Big Five
Five publishers have bought up a large portion of academic journals. One benefit is that you can search across journals on their websites (the library pays for most of this content).