Barnard College Library Research Guide

BC3810 Colloquium on Aid, Politics, and Violence in Africa

Professor Séverine Autesserre
Librarian Jenna Freedman

Child in refugee camp in Chad being vaccinated.
photo: Mark Knobil

This guide is intended as a starting point in your research; the databases and reference tools listed here are a selective list. Always remember that you can ask for assistance at the Barnard Reference Desk at any point in your research, and you can always request a consultation.

DATABASES FOR ARTICLES AND MORE

• Access these indexes and databases from the Find Databases interface.
• Using these resources to find journal articles is sometimes a two-step process; first, find citations in the index, and second, click on to find the full text online or do a Journal Title search in CLIO to find out how to locate the full text online or a print copy.   
• Law, Politics & Government databases only.

These indexes and databases will be good places to start your research. Especially recommended databases first:

• Africa-wide: NiPAD -- Collection of databases providing access to multidisciplinary information on Africa, from 19th century to the present.

• CIAO: Columbia International Affairs Online -- working papers, conference proceedings, journals, books, a schedule of events, and links and resources.

• International Bibliography of the Social Sciences -- citations for publications related to the social sciences.

• International Political Science Abstracts -- citations and abstracts for political science articles in journals and yearbooks published worldwide.

• JSTOR -- full-text articles from more than 322 scholarly journals.

• ProQuest Direct -- full-text, citations, and abstracts from periodicals in many disciplines plus major U.S. newspapers. Also searches (simultaneously):

  • Alt-PressWatch -- Full text database of selected newspapers, magazines, journals of the alternative and independent press. Includes titles such as Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, Chicago Reader, Dissent, Off Our Backs, Poverty and Race.

  • Dissertations & Theses -- citations and abstracts for dissertations and theses covering all academic subjects.

  • Ethnic newsWatch -- Full-text newspaper, magazine, and journal articles from the ethnic, minority, and native press in the U.S. Coverage is from 1960 to date.

• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts -- citations and abstracts articles in political science journals.

But these are important to investigate, too:

• Academic Search Premier -- full text for nearly 4,700 publications, including full text for more than 3,600 peer-reviewed journals.

• AccessUN -- citations to UN publications, with some full-text links.

• Armed conflict database -- This database covers international and internal conflicts, as well as terrorism, incl. information on refugees and returnees, internally displaced persons, weapons used and their flows, fatalities, costs, historical backgrounds, and timelines.

• Business source complete -- full-text articles on business, marketing, management, accounting, finance, international business, econometrics and economics. Contains full text of the Harvard Business Review, California Management Review and other important journals and databases.

• Cambridge journals online -- full text coverage of over 100 electronic journals that are published by Cambridge University Press

• Digital National Security Archive -- collections of declassified documents in areas of U.S. foreign policy and intelligence.

• EconLit -- Contains citations, abstracts and full text to economic research dating back to 1969.

• Historical abstracts -- citations and abstracts for publications related to world history, excluding the U.S. and Canada, from 1450 to the present.

• Humanities Full Text -- citations, abstracts, and full text for articles in humanities periodicals.

• ISI Emerging markets -- Full-text news, financial and economic information on emerging market countries in Latin America, Central & Eastern Europe, East, South and Southeast Asia, Southeast Europe, Central Asia and Caucasus, Africa and Middle East.

• Left index -- citations, abstracts and some full-text to the literature politically on the left.

• LexisNexis Academic -- full-text coverage of general news, business, legal, governmental and other topics.

• National Journal Group's policy central -- full-text politics and policy from the National Journal.

• PAIS international -- citations and abstracts for publications related to public affairs.

• Project Muse -- full-text articles from more than 100 scholarly journals in history and the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences s

• Social Sciences Full Text -- citations, abstracts, full text for articles in social sciences periodicals.

• Sociological abstracts -- Abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences.

• Web of science -- bibliographic information and cited references in the Science citation index expanded, Social sciences citation index and Arts & humanities citation index.

FINDING DATA & PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIALS

• AP Photo Archive -- Associated Press photo archive.
• Columbia: Electronic Data Service -- operated jointly by the Columbia University Libraries and Academic Information Systems (AcIS) to support instruction and research that involve numeric and geo-spatial data resources.
• Digital National Security Archive -- collections of declassified documents in areas of U.S. foreign policy and intelligence.
• International data base (IDB) -- a computerized data bank containing statistical tables of demographic and socio-economic data for 228 countries and areas of the world.
• Monthly Bulletin of Statistics (UN) -- statistics from the United Nations.

• United Nations common database (UNCDB) -- statistical tables covering many topics for countries worldwide.

Last Modified 03/19/2008
Jenna Freedman
Coordinator of Reference Services / Zine Librarian