Research Guides | Beyond the Basics

Are you familiar with some of the Library’s key databases, such as Academic Search Premier, PAIS, and WorldCat? If so, do you want to make sure you’re tapping into other library resources effectively? We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the following:

Please contact a SAIS Reference Librarian for guidance in using any Library resources.

SAIS and MSE Library web pages
On the SAIS Library website, see:

A - Z Online Resources: Browsing this list may help you discover some of our lesser known but valuable online resources (databases, indexes, etc). 
Research Services and Tools 
Email reference form: Ask a question or request an appointment with a reference librarian.
Overviews and Subject Guides To Research: Recommended resources and tips for searching individual databases.

The MSE Library (aka Sheridan Libraries) website, see:

Online Resources: Links to databases, most available to SAIS users. 
Research Help: Guides to research by subject.
MSE Government Publications/Maps/Law Library: Useful links to government information, maps and statistics. 

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Research Guides and Bibliographies
There are many excellent published reference tools and research guides to point you to books, journals, articles, primary resources, and non-print sources. Some of them cover broad areas while others are for a narrow subject or field. A general and extremely useful guide that offers tips on how to conduct library research effectively is:

The Oxford Guide to Library Research by Thomas Mann (Oxford University Press, 2005). Call No.: Z 710 .M23 2005. 

Examples of specialized guides include Guide To Reference Books, The American Historical Association’s Guide to Historical Literature, and Information Sources of Political Science. To identify more research guides and bibliographies, see the Subject Guides to Research on the SAIS Library and MSE Library websites.

You might also try searching the JHU Libraries Catalog or WorldCat: 

TIP: Broaden or expand your subject headings

Example:  if you’re researching the Cuban Missile Crisis, you might search subject headings related to Political Science, History, U.S. Foreign Relations, U.S.-Soviet Relations, the Cold War, the Kennedy presidency, or U.S. relations with Latin America.  Combine these headings with subject keywords such as “bibliography” or “research” or “handbooks” or “library resources.”

Sample search:
Soviet and united states and relations as subject keyword
AND
(bibliography or research or handbooks or library resources) as subject keyword

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SAIS Interlibrary Loan Services
Are you finding references to titles that don’t seem to be available in a JHU Library?  Create your own interlibrary loan account at the SAIS ILL website and let the SAIS Library Interlibrary Loan staff find them for you. Your account will allow you to keep track of all current and past requests.

For more details about the SAIS Library interlibrary loan service, see the ILL FAQ at

TIPS: When you find a reference that interests you in a library database, look for the FindIt  icon. If SAIS does not own the title you want, FindIt will enable you to request it on interlibrary loan without any additional typing. Your citation will automatically export onto the request form.

Although interlibrary loan books arrive via U.S. mail, most articles are delivered electronically, so you can submit requests for articles, and we can deliver them to you, even if you’re outside of DC. 
 

Bibliographic Management Tools
RefWorks, a web-based software available free to all JHU users, allows you to

• Build bibliographies of citations of books, articles, and other sources for use in various documents.
• Create properly formatted bibliographies.
• Import citations from library databases and catalogs.
• Access your references from any computer with Internet access, anywhere, anytime.

Before using RefWorks, we recommend you take their one of their webinars. More details are on SAIS Library's Refworks page. Note that RefWorks may be used in tandem with bibliographic managers such as ProCite and EndNote.


Alert Services / RSS
Alerting services and RSS are what is known as "push technology." Normally, you pull information from the web yourself. With push technology, you select information to be delivered - or pushed out - to you directly.

Alerts: Many databases offer alerts, automatically emailing to you the latest table of contents from a particular journal, or the latest article citations on a particular topic. Check the “help” screens of the database you’re using to see if they offer an alert service. EBSCO, CSA, WilsonWeb, and ProQuest  among others, offer alerting options; each requires you to set up an account in the database.

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and is basically a summary of the content of a Web page. This summary might be just the headlines of the articles on the page, the headlines plus a sentence or two excerpt of the articles, or even the headlines plus the entire articles. Content can be delivered to you using a special reader or website, such as Bloglines. RSS automatically updates your reader with the latest content from multiple sources - all delivered to that one place.

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Sources of information on dissertations
Dissertations and Theses is the premier source for identifying US dissertations. It includes:

• References to virtually all US dissertations back to the 1860s, some MA theses and non-U.S. dissertations.
• Free PDFs of almost all dissertations completed 1997 to present.

TIP: Searching by subject?  Subject headings in this database are very broad, so try to use keywords that might appear in the title or abstract.

Need a non-US dissertation? If you have the author and title, and name of institution, you can submit an interlibrary loan request and we can ask the Center for Research Libraries, of which SAIS is a member, to order a copy that we can borrow on interlibrary loan. Be aware, though, that this process can take up to a few months. 

Government Documents

Inter-governmental: 

• U.N. documents can be identified through Access UN, which functions as an index to U.N. documents (and provides some full-text), and the United Nations Official Document System
• Treaties may be found in the UN Treaty Collection.
• Documents of intergovernmental agencies are often identifiable via WorldCat, the JHU Libraries Catalog, or through the agencies' websites, with some documents available for free on the web and others by subscription. SAIS subscribes to SourceOECD, offering many OECD publications, as well as the World Bank e-Library.

National documents, non-U.S.:

• Guide to Official Publications of Foreign Countries (2nd ed.), ed. by Gloria Westfall for the American Library Association (CIS Press, 1997), is an extensive, but selective, bibliography of government publications of most countries of the world.  Call no.: REF Z 7162 .G7G85 1997
• Northwestern University provides links to government agencies in most countries via their International Documents page. 
• The Library of Congress owns a number of documents of other countries. Visit the Serial and Government Publications Division and/or the Law Library of Congress. The Law Library of Congress maintains the Global Legal Information Network, a database of official texts of laws, regulations, judicial decisions and other legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations.
• Portals To The World are links to electronic resources arranged by country or area with the links for each sorted into a wide range of broad categories. It is maintained by Library of Congress subject experts.

National documents, U.S.: 

• Since 1994 many U.S. documents have been published in full-text in GPO Access.
• The Catalog of U. S. Government Publications serves as an index to these publications, and provides links to full text when available.
• Foreign Relations of the United States is available via Hein Online and in print in the SAIS Library stacks (JX 233 .A23).
• Congress and its many arms are the most prolific publishers in the U. S. government. Lexis Nexis Congressional is a thorough index to congressional publications, including abstracts and a large amount of full text.

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Quantitative Resources
See the SAIS Library’s Guide to Statistics Sources for a selective list of print and online statistics sources in the SAIS Library. 

MSE Government Publications/Maps/Law Library (GPML) web page offers links to data archives.  

Some specialized resources for quantitative data include:

ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan is a membership-based organization providing access to one of the world's largest archives of research and instructional data in the social sciences. The data may be used via STATA, SAS, or SPSS.

ArcGIS is a widely-used geospatial mapping program, which can be used with the researcher’s own data or with datasets (including census data and world-wide topographical maps). Includes manuals and web-based training. May be borrowed for two-week periods from the MSE Government Publications/Maps/Law Library.

Wharton Research Data Services is a web-based business data research service from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Johns Hopkins subscribes to select databases that are part of WRDS, and are available via individual accounts to current SAIS students and full-time faculty.  Information on how to apply for an account is in A - Z Online Resources.

Primary Resources
Primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an historical event or time period. Large collections of primary sources are published in books; a growing number have been digitized; and many are available only at special repositories, such as the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

See Research Guide: Finding Primary Resources on the MSE webpage for some useful tips and suggestions for identifying primary resources. 

See also Sources of Primary Document Materials for a selective list of resources in the SAIS Library that you can use to identify sources of primary materials as well as some print and online sources that include the actual primary documents.

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Citation Databases
If you have identified a particularly useful book or article on the subject you are researching, you can use a citation database to identify journal articles that have cited it. This is a gauge of the influence of a particular title and how much debate it generated. An added benefit is that the "citing" articles may be of interest to you, but may not be ones you would have found in the course of a subject search.

Web of Science is the largest citation database, covering thousands of journals. You can use Web of Science to find articles that have cited a particular book or journal article, but not to find books that have cited articles or books.

TIPS:  If you’ve identified a journal article and you want to find other articles that have cited it, we recommend you use General Search to find a reference to your article. You will then be able to click on the article and retrieve a list of other articles that have cited it. 

If you’ve identified a book and want to find articles that have cited it, use the Cited Ref search form. You will retrieve a list of “cited references”.  Select the appropriate ones and click on “Finish Search” to see a list of articles that cite the book.

To make the best use of Web of Science, we strongly recommend taking its online tutorial.

Google Scholar results often have "Cited By" links to citing publications.

Google Books searches the full text of books, potentially identifying works that include your title in a footnote or bibliography.

Tip: Not only can you set the preferences to work with JHU's FIND IT service, you can also set it to easily import citations into RefWorks.

Here are more details on what Google Scholar results screens offer.

Google Books allows you to search the full text of books that Google has scanned for its vast Google Books project. Google is working with University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library, the University of Virginia, the University of California, and publishers to digitize the books in their collections. In some cases they show a few snippets - sentences of your search term in context - and in others you might see several pages. If a book is determined to be in the public domain, Google shows the full text. It’s important to remember that Google Books is a project-in-progress; many books are not yet included.

rev. May 2008
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