Popular Sources
- FactivaCurrent and historical news from thousands of publications worldwide in over 20 languages. Company overviews and stock data are available for public companies.
- Nexis UniIndexes new, business, and legal resources.
- Polling the NationsPrimary data, fulltext for approximately 250,000 individual questions and aggregated responses, often cross tabulated by respondent characteristics, compiled from public opinion surveys. Topics cover social, health, economic, and political issues at local, state, national, and international levels.
Citing Your Sources
Here are resources providing guidance on how to format your papers from the Chicago Manual of Style:
Using Citations to Find Books
If your citation is a book, use Franklin, the Library catalog. Franklin will help you find the library in which the book is located, and the call number.
Other important resources for finding books:
- Guide to Articles+
- Van Pelt Stacks Directory
- Reading Call Numbers
- Other Libraries
- If the book is in "LIBRA"
Using Citations to Find Articles
If you have a complete article citation, or even just a journal title, you can use the PennText article finder on the Library homepage.
If we do not have access to a book or journal article in any format, use interlibrary loan to request a copy from another library
Scholarly Databases
- Google ScholarAccess 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.
- APA PsycInfoThe American Psychological Association's comprehensive indexing and abstracting service for the professional and scholarly literature in psychology and related fields. Coverage is worldwide. Sources are in English and over thirty languages.
- The Philosopher's IndexServing philosophers worldwide, this database contains over 650,000 records from publications that date back to 1902 and originate from 139 countries in 37 languages. This ready source of information covers all subject areas of philosophy and related disciplines.
- PubMed Plus, with Full-textThe public version of Medline, the premier database for biomedical literature. This enhanced version has links to those full-text journals to which the Penn Library subscribes.
- ScopusIndexes most peer reviewed journals in science, technology, and medicine, and many in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Scopus also includes a number of trade publications and conference papers, and can perform author and affiliation searching.
- EBSCO MegaFILEGeneral, 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.
- JSTORJSTOR 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.
Penn's subscription currently includes all the available collections:
- the Arts & Sciences Collection I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and the Complement
- the Business II & III Collection
- the Biological Sciences Collection
- the Health & General Science Collection
- the Language and Literature Collection
- the Music Collection
- the 19th Century British Pamphlets
Access to journals from JSTOR is restricted to current Penn faculty, staff and students.
Printing from the JSTOR database requires downloading a helper application called JPrint.
- Penn Libraries websiteAccess our entire range of resources and services from our website. Feel free to contact us if you need assistance.
How to Read a Citation
 |
Book citations generally show a publisher and a city of publication. Book chapters will include the title of the chapter as well as the name of the book. |
 |
Article citations have a journal/periodical title in addition to the article title. They will usually also show a volume and issue number, and may show a day and month. |
Keyword Searching
This document suggests a good method of crafting effective keyword searches:
Engineering Librarian
Johnson Pavilion
3610 Hamilton Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104