Guides: Asian American Studies: Literature Review

Subject Specific Indexes

Sociological Abstracts
Covers sociology, case work, demographics, policy studies, political science, family studies, feminist studies, and social security programs. Indexes over 2000 journals from 35 countries, plus relevant dissertations, national and international conference papers, selected books and book chapters, book and other media reviews. 1963 to the present. Updated bimonthly. Covers sociology, case work, demographics, policy studies, political science, family studies, feminist studies, and social security programs. Indexes over 2000 journals from 35 countries, plus relevant dissertations, national and international conference papers, selected books and book chapters, book and other media reviews.
Holdings: 1963 to the present. Updated bimonthly.
America: History and Life
The major scholarly database for U. S. and Canadian history

MLA Bibliography
The premier database for literary and language studies
Communication Source
The premier research database for communication studies. Covers academic, popular and trade journals.

Race Relations Abstracts
Produced for the Institute of Race Relations (UK). Will include overlap of Sociological Abstracts.
ERIC (Education Information Resource Center) - ProQuest
If it's about children, ERIC - the US Department of Education's comprehensive index for education research and professional literature - is always a good place to look for both published literature and gray literature.
Bibliography of Asian Studies
The best place to look for Western-language research literature on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, 1971-present with selected coverage back to 1779..
HINT! BAS uses "Overseas Communities" to identify populations outside an Asian country. Use "Advanced Search" to select your Asian country, and search for Subject = "overseas communities" along with your topic.
APA PsycInfo
Indexes literature in psychology and related fields.
Contemporary Women's Issues
Covers a wide variety of scholarly and popular periodicals as well as gray literature on global women's issues, 1992-present.

Multidisciplinary Databases

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.
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.

ISI Web of Science - the citation indexes

ISI Web of Science - also known as "The citation indexes", including Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index - is all about article bibliographies. As the database covers a wide range of subjects (it's strongest in the life sciences), your citation chasing will return broader results than similar tools in SocAbs.

Got an article you really like?

Find it in ISI Web of Science.
Look at its "Times Cited" link to see other more recent articles that have included it in their bibliographies.
Look at its "Related Records" to see other articles that share references in their bibliographies.

As the database covers a wide range of subjects (it's strongest in the life sciences), your citation chasing will return broader results than similar tools in PsycINFO.

Got a methodology, tool, or technique you want to see applied to your topic?

Consult an encyclopedia or handbook for the classic publication about that methodology.
Do a "Topic search" in ISI Web of Science, the broader the better.
Do a "Cited Reference search" in ISI Web of Science for the classic publication. (You're looking for the classic's citation in an article bibliography.)
Use "Search History" to combine the two searches.

When in doubt, ask for help. Cited reference searching in ISI Web of Science can be tricky.

Dissertations

Doctoral dissertations are book-length works of original research. (Some dissertations, typically in economics and demography, are collections of article-length research reports.) Dissertations are particularly useful for several reasons:

They may cover current events, or they may address very recent scholarship practices, more quickly than journal articles or books.
They may provide very detailed primary-source material (interview transcripts, text reproductions, expanded statistical treatments), methodological descriptions (questionnaires, interview protocols, event recording templates), and other useful supporting information typically omitted from journal articles or books.
They include chapter-length literature reviews, as doctoral candidates are expected to situate their dissertation topic within the larger research community.

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (aka UMI)
The comprehensive database of U.S. doctoral dissertations, recently expanded to cover foreign dissertations. For 1997-present, fulltext is often available. For older dissertations, fulltext is scarce - use ILL:Request Book when fulltext is not available.
HINT! Search PQDT using "Anywhere except full text - ALL". PQDT is a fulltext database, and dissertations are book-length works. "ALL" will search titles and abstracts only.