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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.

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.

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.

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.

Interlibrary Loan

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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).