Guides: BENF 227: Global Health Justice and Governance: Home

Research Videos

Scholarly Databases

These databases will help you find scholarly articles about your topic.

HINT! Try to search by building sets of synonyms linked together with "OR" (between synonyms) and "AND" (between sets of synonyms).

(botswana OR tswana OR kalanga OR san OR bechuana*)
(botswana OR "southern africa" OR zimbabwe OR malawi OR zambia OR namibia)
(cancer OR disease* OR malaria OR hiv OR aids OR "human immunodeficiency" OR "acquired immune")

IBSS - International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
The best one-stop indexing database for the social sciences journal and book literature. Covers the scholarly literature worldwide 1955-present, focusing on anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology.
Sociological Abstracts
SocAbs covers scholarly works in sociology, demography, and human rights. Recently absorbed Social Services Abstracts to add coverage of social policy, social work, and social planning. Has a strong orientation toward US publications, but cover worldwide materials, too.
CINAHL
A great bibliographic database on nursing topics, includng patient care, access to health care, and health care provision.
Anthropology PLUS
Two library catalogs (with journal article records) in one database, covering all subdisciplines of anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology: lots of duplication that forgives careless searching!

Global Health
A very large bibliographic database, extending back to 1910 and covering public health, tropical and communicable diseases, and other health topics worldwide.
ALERT!
Our Global Health subscription has a limited number of ports. If you're turned away, try MEDLINE.
SEARCH SUGGESTIONS:
Searching this is not intuitive. Work in steps. So, search on each keyword synonym set separately. After you've completed a few searches, check on some of the numbered "Search History" sets, and combine those selections with "and."
Search results appear at the bottom of the search display. Don't be fooled! They're there - just scroll down the page.
WARNING!
Global Health includes clinical research articles that may be too technical for your needs. DO NOT BE DISTRACTED!

WHOLIS
The WHO Library catalog. Provides links to fulltext World Health Organization publications and other items. WHOLIS also indexes individual articles in many public health journals.
HINT!
If there's no hyperlink to fulltext for WHOLIS items that look interesting, use the PennText Article Finder, Google Scholar, or Franklin to find fulltext.
Annual Reviews
A fulltext e-journal collection, with all titles starting, "Annual Review of ...". Articles are lengthy literature reviews, often with ENORMOUS bibliographies. Useful for both the text summary and the citations for further reading.
SEARCH SUGGESTION:
Click on the search box in the upper right corner of the startup window to open the Advanced Search template. Then restrict your searching to the AnnRev journals on Anthropology, Sociology, and Public Health.

Google Scholar
Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.

Search for databases by subject

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