News articles can provide helpful contemporaneous information and analysis of current events.
Have you already spent 20 minutes searching and you feel like you're hitting a wall? Stop what you're doing and contact your librarian!
Research takes time, and when you're working on research for a paper you might spend hours researching and try many, many searches before you're done. But you shouldn't spend hours searching and finding nothing. If you spend 20-30 minutes on your research and you're not finding anything remotely relevant, please stop what you're doing and contact your librarian! I can help you develop search search strategy, and maybe choose another database more suited for your topic.
This course page was created for ISTD 4800: Capstone Seminar in International Studies. This is just a selection of sources that may be useful to you in this course. Contact your International Studies Librarian (Rebecca Hyde) with a question or to make an appointment for an in-depth research consultation. For quick and/or general questions you can contact Rebecca or use our 24/5 chat assistance to get help with your research!
Some databases will include the full-text of articles, but others will include the 
button which links to full-text when available and if not available, gives you the option to request articles for free through Interlibrary Loan's Illiad service.
Keep track: Keep a list of the databases and search terms you used, that way you'll know what you already tried and where you had success!
Quotation marks: “Arab Spring” searches for the phrase Arab Spring. Searching without quotation marks will search for Arab and Spring anywhere in the record.
Asterisk: democra* searches for democracy, democratic, democratization, etc.
Question mark: wom?n searches for women and woman
Save what you find: Use a citation management software (like EndNote or Zotero) or other method that works for you to keep track of articles and books you find.
Trace the Literature: Use an article’s reference list to find additional articles & use a citation database/index (like Web of Science or Google Scholar) to find a list of more recent articles that have cited a given article.
Use Zotero or End Note to keep all your references in one place & to make citing sources easy when writing your paper.
Repository of social science data sets for research and instruction. Disciplines represented include political science, sociology, economics, history, education, gerontology, criminal justice, public health, foreign policy, and law.
