Skip to Main Content
Research Guides
? Ask Us / FAQS

Political Science *

Below are links to databases and scholarly web sites that support the study of political science and its related sub-disciplines.

Multi-Disciplinary Databases

Listed below are multidisciplinary databases--scholarly search engines that search a variety of subject areas all at once--that can be used to scan the literature on a topic. Use these databases to do an initial scan of the literature on a topic.

  • BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine -- a comprehensive search engine that indexes scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. Approximately sixty percent of contents are freely accessible, although BASE does not currently offer full-text searching.
  • Google Scholar -- searches mostly scholarly materials, such as, books, book chapters, journal articles, research reports, dissertations and theses, technical reports, working papers, and many other document types. To set up Google Scholar so that you have full-text access to USC Libraries resources, click here.
  • JSTOR -- a multidisciplinary archive of scholarly journal articles covering most major disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Useful for identifying historical research on a topic; it does not cover current research published within the last three to five years.
  • OmniFile Full Text -- a database of essential publications for research across many disciplines, including applied sciences, art, education, ethnic studies, humanities, law, social sciences, technology, and women's studies. It includes the full text of articles from more than 3,000 journals dating back to 1994 with additional coverage since 1982.
  • ProQuest Multiple -- a database with extensive full-text and linked coverage of scholarly journals, news magazines, and newspapers. Good place to begin your search for scholarly journal articles or current news coverage of a topic.
  • ProQuest Dissertations and Theses -- access to doctoral dissertations and Master's theses from more than 3,100 contributing institutions. The database contains full text PDF copies of over 2.5 million of titles with 200,000 works added annually. Contents are updated weekly.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

Key Political Science Databases

Below are links to databases and electronic resources that support the study of political science and its related sub-disciplines.

  • CQ Electronic Library -- provides full text access to the CQ Weekly, known as the pre-eminent resource for Congress-watchers who need nonpartisan information on Capitol Hill, and the CQ Researcher, which provides in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. Reports are published weekly 44 times a year.
  • CQ Weekly Online -- includes an archive dating back to 1983 of the CQ Weekly magazine, which provides congressional news and analysis, bill tracking, member profiles, committee coverage, government documents and transcripts.
  • LEXIS/NEXIS State Net -- provides comprehensive access to state bills and laws, constitutions, proposed and enacted, regulations, newspapers of record articles about legislative issues affecting the states. NOTE: Database is currently limited to one user at a time. Contact Eimmy Solis for how to access database.
  • Policy Commons -- platform for objective, fact-based research from the world’s leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, and intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. The database provides advanced searching across millions of pages of books, articles, working papers, reports, policy briefs, data sets, tables, charts, media, case studies, and statistical publications, including archived reports from more than 200 defunct think tanks. Coverage is international in scope.
  • PolicyFile -- provides full-text access to U.S. foreign and domestic policy papers and gray literature published by a wide variety of think tanks, research institutes, and agencies. PolicyFile is updated weekly with abstracts and links to the latest reports, papers, and documents.
  • ProQuest Congressional -- indexes and abstracts a broad spectrum of Congressional publications, including hearings (testimony), committee prints, reports, documents, and full text of bills and public laws.
  • ProQuest Political Science -- this database gives users access to hundreds of leading political science and international relations journals from Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. However, also included is more than a thousand recent full-text doctoral dissertations, together with working papers, conference proceedings, country profiles, political news and other sources.
  • Public Affairs Information Services [PAIS] -- indexes selective subjects and bibliographic access to periodicals, books, hearings, reports, gray literature, government publications, Internet resources, and other publications from 120 countries. Includes historical coverage from 1915 to the present.
  • Public Administration Abstracts -- provides information on public administration-related publications worldwide covering such areas as administration and economy, administration and politics, administration and society, administrative structures and organization, public and social services, public service personnel, and theory and method.
  • Worldwide Political Science Abstracts -- provides indexing of the international journal literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration and policy. Over 1,700 titles are monitored for coverage and, of these, 67% are published outside of the United States.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

Important Databases Related to Political Science

Important Databases Related to Political Science

  • Access World News -- comprehensive news collection for exploring issues and events at the local, regional, national and international level. Source types include print and online-only newspapers, blogs, newswires, journals, broadcast transcripts and videos.
  • AccessUN -- indexes the majority of United Nations documents and publications. Articles appearing in UN periodicals are individually indexed as well as bilateral and multilateral treaties in the UN Treaty Series.
  • American Political Science Association Preprints -- provides access to preliminary research studies and working papers in political science before the studies have completed the peer review process leading to formal publication as a journal article or book chapter.
  • Columbia International Affairs Online [CIAO] -- provides the full text of a wide range of scholarship books, working papers from universities and research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, and proceedings from conferences.
  • Economist Intelligence Unit [EIU] Country Reports -- a source of business intelligence on political and economic trends in 200 countries from 1996 to the present. An overall profile of each country is provided annually and a current report is produced quarterly. Both include current detailed statistics.
  • Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports -- consists of full-text Daily Reports published from 1941 through 1996. This is an important resource for worldwide non-US media reports on social, economic, political and international news.
  • Index Islamicus -- indexes literature on Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world. Records included in the database cover almost 100 years of publications on the world of Islam. Material cited in the the database includes not only work written about the Middle East, but also about the other main Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, plus Muslim minorities elsewhere.
  • IREON [International Relations and Area Studies Gateway] -- a database produced by research organizations, libraries, and documentation centers from various European countries that enables searching for journals, collected essays, conference and research papers, official publications, books, and international treaties in the areas of foreign and security policy, international cooperation and development, international economics, European and transatlantic issues, foreign cultural policy, and politics. NOTE: Your browser may post a security warning when clicking on the site, but this is only due to an unfamiliar domain designation [.de] and not a true security risk to your computer.
  • Oxford Bibliographies -- provides a seamless pathway to the most accurate and reliable resources for a variety of academic topics. Every article in the database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, written and reviewed by academic experts across a variety of academic disciplines, with original commentary and annotations. Sources are rigorously peer reviewed and vetted to ensure scholarly accuracy and objectivity.
  • ProQuest Regulatory Insight -- a new database that creates regulatory histories for individual federal statutes and Executive Orders by compiling pertinent Federal Register articles into a search-friendly workspace. It provides researchers with fully searchable PDFs of all Code of Federal Regulations volumes from 1938 to the present, plus separate PDFs of all CFR Titles and Parts, with browse and search options.
  • United States Congressional Serial Set -- commonly referred to as the Serial Set, this collection contains the House and Senate Documents and the House and Senate Reports. The reports are usually from congressional committees dealing with proposed legislation and issues under investigation. The documents include all other papers ordered printed by the House or Senate. Documents cover a wide variety of topics and may include reports of executive departments and independent organizations, reports of special investigations made for Congress, and annual reports of non-governmental organizations. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, executive-branch materials were also published in the Serial Set.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

Other Useful Databases

Use the disciplinary-specific databases to locate additional studies that relate to and extend thinking about the research problem you are investigating in political science.

Discipline-specific and Subject Area Databases

More databases can be found using this link: https://libguides.usc.edu/az.php

More databases can be found using this link: https://libguides.usc.edu/az.php

Legal Research

The following databases access legal research studies and scholarly journal articles.

  • British and Irish Legal Information Institute -- a full-text database of British and Irish case law and legislation, European Union case law, Law Commission reports, and other law-related British and Irish material.
  • Findlaw -- searchable database of full-text Supreme Court cases from 1937 to the present as well as federal and state court cases and codes.
  • Global-Regulation -- a comprehensive, user-friendly search engine of machine-produced English translations of regulatory laws from approximately 128 data sources representing jurisdictions throughout the world, including the European Union.
  • HeinOnline Law Journal Library  -- provides access to more than 3,000 searchable, pdf formatted legal and other disciplinary journals. Coverage is from the first issue published for all periodicals. Excellent resource for searching the legal literature on any aspect of law.
  • Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals [from law library e-resources list] -- multilingual index to more than 800 legal journals worldwide from 1984 to the present. The database covers international (public and private), comparative, and municipal law of countries other than the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia. Full-text of articles are available for journals in the HeinOnline system. Otherwise, you can access most journals at the Law Library.
  • LEXIS/NEXIS Academic -- a database that includes full text access to law review journals, federal and state case law, European Union Cases, and the complete contents of the International Legal Materials publication from the American Society of International Law.
  • World Legal Information Institute [WorldLII] Database [copy and paste this link: http://www.worldlii.org/] --  an open access database of Internet-accessible legislation, constitutions, statutes, case law, superior or high court decisions, journals, treaties, law reform, domain name decisions, secondary materials, and related legal material from around the globe.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

Broken Link Help

Found a Broken Link? Let Us Know!

If you are having trouble linking to a database, an e-journal, or any other online resource provided by the USC Libraries, GO TO THIS PAGE and report the problem so we can fix it and let you know when it is available to use.