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/close to what you're looking for, please stop what you're doing and contact your librarian! I can help you develop search search strategies, and maybe choose another database more suited for your topic.
This course page was created for POLS 4692/5690: Theories of World Politics with Professor Nori Katagiri. This is just a selection of sources that may be useful to you in this course. Contact your Political Science Librarian (Rebecca Hyde) with questions 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!
These sources can be used to find background information on specific countries, events, or U.S. policies.
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.
Sources for finding primary source policy documents from Intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations.
Sources for finding primary source foreign policy documents from the United States.
Sources for finding primary source policy documents from non-U.S. countries.
Every U.S. government department is required to have a public reading room that includes access to previously declassified documents. Below are links to some reading rooms, but you can use any search engine to find these publicly available websites for any agency.
Use Zotero or End Note to keep all your references in one place & to make citing sources easy when writing your paper.
