Guides: Africana Studies: Article Databases

Africana Specific Databases

International Index to Black Periodicals
IIBP Full Text includes current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from over 150 scholarly and popular journals, newspapers and newsletters from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean--and full-text coverage of over 20 core Black Studies periodicals (1998 forward).

Black Literature Index
"This index allows users to search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940.

Related Databases

As an extraordinarily interdisciplinary subject, Africana Studies often relies on research from a wide range of disciplines. Some discipline-specific databases that are likely to be related to aspects of Africana Studies are listed here.

MLA International Bibliography
The principal database for literature; also covers film, folklore, language. Covers literature, languages, folklore, and linguistics. Includes English and foreign languages.
Sources: Journal articles, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Citations only. Book reviews are not included in the database
Holdings: Covers 1963 to the present. New records are added ten times a year.
America: History and Life
A bibliographic database indexing books, book chapters, and over 1,800 journals relating to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.
Historical Abstracts
Historical coverage of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada).
ERIC (Education Information Resource Center) - ProQuest
This database is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to provide extensive access to education-related literature. ERIC provides coverage of journal articles, conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books and monographs.
Sociological Abstracts
Covers sociology, case work, demographics, policy studies, political science, family studies, feminist studies, and social security programs.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
Covers all aspects of music, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, instruments and voice, dance, and music therapy. If related to music, works in other fields, such as librarianship, literature, dramatic arts, visual arts, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and physics are included.
Index Islamicus
Bibliographic citations with subject indexing on Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world in general, including Muslims in Africa and Asia and major Muslim minorities worldwide. Topics covered include: education, law, bibliography and scholarship, libraries, philosophy, natural and applied sciences, arts, architecture, geography and travel, social sciences, archaeology, history, economics, politics and current affairs, as well as religion and theology
African Studies Centre, Leiden, Catalogue
Journal article and book chapter abstracts and bibliographic records for books, periodicals, government publications, brochures and pamphlets, and microforms on Africa.

ATLA
Covers all religious traditions; strongest coverage is for materials dealing with the Judeo-Christian tradition. While about half of the material included is in English. Includes materials published in most European languages with extensive coverage of publications in German, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Multidisciplinary Databases

JSTOR
JSTOR specializes in making available the back issues of journals in a wide variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Issues are available both as images and as text, making searching possible both within each title and across the whole database.
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.
EBSCO MegaFILE
General, multidisciplinary periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
Scopus
Indexes peer reviewed journals in science, technology, and medicine.