Sociology: Articles & E-Journals

An introduction to databases and tools for sociology research

Database Search Tricks

AND returns results containing all terms: alcohol AND murder
OR returns results with either term: murder OR homicide
Parentheses ( ) indicate separate concepts, like an equation, (A or B) and C: alcohol AND (murder OR homicide)
Quotation marks " " return results using that specific phrase: "alcohol consumption"
Truncation * returns results with a root word and any ending: sociolog* [finds sociology, sociological ...]
Watch for citation chaining features that allow you to find items that are cited by or also cite a relevant item.

JSTOR
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Full-text back issues of hundreds of scholarly journals. Check "Sociology" in the disciplines list to limit to the sociology journals covered by JSTOR.

ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
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Current issues of scholarly journals published primarily in the sciences and social sciences.
Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
A collection of quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages.

Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
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The best index for Sociology journal articles, conference papers and dissertations. Use the Thesaurus to explore sociology subject headings, see ProQuest's guide to Sociological Abstracts for help searching, and check the ProQuest database page for info on coverage.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
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Excellent interdisciplinary social science coverage; can answer "who has cited this book or article?"
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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Scholarly and general interest sources (about 50% full text) in business, humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.
Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full-Text This link opens in a new window
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International in scope, indexing publications in criminology and related disciplines.
Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
A collection of quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages.

Google Scholar
A large but uneven collection of citations across a wide range of subject areas, including scholarly articles.
SocArXiv Papers
Open archive of the social sciences and part of the Open Science Framework Preprints server

To locate the full text of an article in a database, use the purple button:

Ulrichsweb This link opens in a new window
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Journal info, including whether it's peer-reviewed

Journal metrics:

Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
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Tool for ranking journals by their citation influence. From the makers of Web of Science.

Google Scholar metrics
Another tool for ranking journals by citation influence, using the h-5 & h-5 median indicators
ScImago
Journal & country ranks; uses Scopus data.
Eigenfactor Journal Ranking
Algorithm developed by researchers at UW that "rank[s] journals much as Google ranks websites."
CiteScore
Free metrics from Elsevier, for serial titles in the Scopus database
CWTS Journal Indicators
Indicators, including Impact per Publication (IPP) & Source Normalized Impact per Publication (SNIP), drawing on data from the Scopus database