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Political Science *: Finding Articles in Databases

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

Key Political Science Databases

Below are links to databases and electronic resources that support the study of political science and its related sub-disciplines. For a more comprehensive list, go here. Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

  • 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 analysis of current public policy topics.
  • CQ Researcher --   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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Facts On File World News Digest -- brings together an archival record of domestic and international news, updated weekly and containing more than one million internal hyperlinks and new features such as tabbed search results. The contents cover all major political, social, and economic events since November 1940.
  • 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.
  • 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 databasethat 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

Multidisciplinary Databases

Subject Area Databases

Legal Research

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

  • Brill Online Reference Works -- a database indexing the scholarly book content of Brill/Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, a leading publisher of imprints in international law and human rights law. Use the database to locate titles that can then be searched in the USC Libraries Catalog or, if not found there, the Law Library Catalog.
  • 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.
  • Foreign Law Guide -- contains both primary and secondary source legal information for more than 170 jurisdictions from major nations to crown colonies, semi-independent states, and supra-national regional organizations.
  • Global Legal Information Network -- a public database of official texts of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations.
  • 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 -- full text access to digitized content of major legal periodicals, the Federal Register, and other law-related materials.
  • Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals -- a multilingual index to articles and book reviews published worldwide.. The database covers international (public and private), comparative, and municipal law of countries other than the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia.
  • 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 --  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.

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