Library Resources for Education and Social Policy
Locating books and other materials—
Use NUcat, the catalog of all the Northwestern libraries, to search for books on your topic, using either the Subject Heading search or one of the Keyword search options.
Also, remember to use NUcat to verify whether or not the NU Libraries have access to items you identified using the article databases listed below. Use the Journal Title search and type in the name of the journal or magazine, not the name of the article. If a citation is for an association paper or other report, try a guided search in NUcat on either the citation title, name of institute, or name of association.
Interlibrary Loan for materials not owned by Northwestern
WorldCat
Materials can be requested directly via WorldCat. The requests go through our
ILL department.
Interlibrary
Loan Department at NU Library
You may also request materials from other universities and institutions from
our ILL department. You do not need to know the holding institution. ILL can
locate the nearest, quickest copy for you.
Locating articles
Use article indexes (often referred to as "databases") to search for articles in scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers.
General / Multidisciplinary Databases
The above two databases cover a large number of scholarly journals in a wide variety of disciplines and are often good places to start your literature search. Both allow searching by keywords, but also have subject thesauri for more precise searching. Academic OneFile in particular has an excellent thesaurus of subject headings. Both databases include links to online, full-text versions of many of the articles indexed. Dates of coverage vary for each journal, but in general each database has indexing dating back to the mid-1980s.
Provides electronic access to back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences and the sciences. Articles have been digitized, providing full-image access to the complete runs of over 100 journals. Users may browse by journal and issue, or may search the full text of the articles. Since JSTOR is intended to be an archive, it does not include the current issues of journals nor the most recent four or five years.
Subject-specific / discipline-specific databases
ERIC: Educational Resources Information Center
ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center), is an information system sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education that generates the U.S. national bibliographic database covering the literature of education. The ERIC database consists of two files : the Resources in Education (RIE) file of document citations and the Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE) file of journal article citations from over 750 professional journals. In addition, ERIC now contains over 850 ERIC Digest records that feature the full text of the original document.
Education Abstracts is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles of at least one column in length from English-language periodicals and yearbooks published in the United States and elsewhere. English-language books relating to education published in 1995 or later are also indexed. Abstracting coverage begins with January 1994. Abstracts range from 50 to 300 words and describe the content and scope of the source documents.
Citations and abstracts of articles from approximately 2500 journals, as well as conference papers, dissertations, book reviews and selected sociology books. The database covers sociology and sociological topics in fields such as anthropology, economics, education, medicine, community development, philosophy, demography, political science and social psychology.
Citations and abstracts to articles in the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines. This broad range of fields includes medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, and linguistics, among others. Updated monthly, its worldwide coverage contains references and abstracts to over 1,300 journals in more than 25 languages, and to book chapters and books in the English language (beginning in 1987).
PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service)
A bibliographic index to the literature of public policy, social policy, and the social sciences in general. Journal articles; books; government documents; statistical compilations; committee reports; directories; serials; reports of public, intergovernmental, and private organizations; and most other forms of printed literature from all over the world are indexed.
EconLit is a comprehensive, indexed bibliography with selected abstracts of the world's economic literature, produced by the American Economic Association. It covers more than 400 economics journals, as well as citations from edited collections, dissertations and working papers licensed from the Cambridge University Press Abstracts of Working Papers in Economics.
Citation indexes covering virtually all areas of scholarship. Search by cited reference in order to learn who has cited whom and how many times. Citations may also be searched by topic, author or source title.
Find other article databases by title or subject here
Databases for articles from newspapers—
Access World News
You may also search Proquest Dissertations and Theses to find abstracts and, in many cases, link to the full text of dissertations
from NU and other institutions.
Using Endnote to manage your citations
Get help, starting with the Library's Endnote Support page
Help available from the Reference Department
The Reference Department offers walk-in assistance, research consultations, email help, and other services.
Jeannette Moss
Reference Librarian
847-491-2169
j-moss@northwestern.edu
Qunying Li
Liaison for Education & Social Policy
847-491-3953
qunying-li@northwestern.edu
Reference Department
847-491-7656
refdept@northwestern.edu
