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Political Science

Resources and helpful information for your research in political science.

Top Databases in Political Science

Additional Political Science Databases: 

Annual Review of Political Science

Annual Review of Political Science provides detailed literature reviews on topics related to Political Science. Each review captures the current understanding of a topic, sets the work in a historical context, highlights major unanswered questions and the likely course of research in the upcoming years, as well as outlines the practical applications and general significance of the research. Additionally, each review is accompanied by an extensive bibliography to guide researchers into critical resources on the topic covered. 

Search for a specific journal

Browse Political Science Journals

Video and Information about Finding and Using Articles

screenshot of module showing Database Searching title

If you have a citation for an article that you would like to find, use this step by step guide that walks you through the process.

Let's start with our example citation: 

Boksem, M.A.S., & Smidts, A. (2015). Brian responses to movie trailers predict individual preferences for movies and their population-wide commercial success. Journal of Marketing Research, 52(4), 482-492.

Begin at the Journal Finder on Wallace Library's homepage and enter the title of the journal in which your article was published. 

So for our example citation, we will be looking for the Journal of Marketing Research. 

Journal search box searching for Journal of Marketing Research

 

Once you've entered in your journal title and clicked search, you will get a page similar to below. If you get no results or if the journal you are seeking does not show up, the library does not have access to the journal and you may submit a request through interlibrary loan. 

Using our example citation from above, I want to click on the title Journal of Marketing Research. 

Screenshot of the journal page showing the articles available for each issue. Archive of articles allow you to navigate to the year, volume, and issue of the article you seek.

 

Now we need to navigate to the correct issue in which the article was published. To do that we identify the year, volume, and issue in our citation. 

Using our example citation,  I am looking for an article that was published in 2015, volume 52, issue 4. 

Screenshot of the journal page with the year, volume, and issue highlighted to demonstrate how to narrow down your results to the article you seek.

 

Now that you've navigated to the correct issue in which your article was published, you can scroll down until you see the title of the article. Click on the PDF button to download the PDF of the article. 

Screenshot of article level information. Click on the download PDF to get the full text of the article.

 

If you have any difficulties, please don't hesitate to reach out!

How to read a scholarly article. Step 1: Read the Abstract. An abstract is a summary of the article, and will give you an idea of what the article is about and how it will be written. If there are lots of complicated subject-specific words in the abstract, the article will be just as hard to read. Step 2: Read the Conclusion. This is where the author will repeat all of their ideas and their findings. Some authors even use this section to compare their study to others. By reading this, you’ll notice a few things you missed, and will get another overview of the content. Step 3: Read the first paragraph or the introduction. This is usually where the author will lay out their plan for the article and describe the steps they will take to talk about their topic. By reading this, you will know what parts of the article will be the most relevant to your topic! Step 4: Read the first sentence of every paragraph. These are called topic sentences, and will usually introduce the idea for the paragraph that follows. By reading this first, you can make sure that the paragraph has information relevant to your topic before reading the entire thing. Step 5: Read the rest of the article. Now that you have gathered the idea of the article through the abstract, conclusion, introduction, and topic sentences, you can read the rest of the article! To review, you want to read the article in the following order: abstract, conclusion, introduction, topic sentences, entire article. Image: Undergraduate Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Reproduced with permission.