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ED POL/HISTORY 143: History of Race and Inequality in Urban America (Spring 2024) : Find Articles

Selecting and Searching Databases by Subject or Type

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You can access databases from the library home page (library.wisc.edu). Use the dropdown menu at the Catalog button to navigate to Databases

There are several ways to browse and select databases: 

Search by the title of the database (for example, 'Academic Search').

Use the Browse by Subject/Type page to discover databases that cover your media's topic.

Go to the Introductory Databases page to find good starting databases in over 15 subject areas.

Visit the Top 10 Databases page to quickly access a selection of popularly-used databases. 

Suggested Databases for This Class

Databases to start with...

These databases have lots of scholarly articles on different aspects of history, race, and inequality in America.  They are all from the vendor EBSCO, which means their search interfaces are very similar.  Some of the content covered in each database overlaps with the others.

  • Academic Search: Large, multidisciplinary database encompassing most topics.
  • America: History and Life: database that provides access to journal articles covering topics related to United States and Canadian history. For the rest of the world, see Historical Abstracts.
  • Education Research Complete:  database that covers research in the field of education from early childhood through higher education. Covers journal articles, conference papers, and selected books.
  • SocIndex With Full Text: Covers all aspects of sociology, including criminal justice, ethnicity and race, gender studies, politics, social work, substance abuse, urban studies, violence, welfare, and more.
  • Urban Studies Abstracts: includes citations with summaries to journal articles covering essential areas related to urban studies, including urban affairs, community development, urban history, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.

 

Also helpful 

These database might also be helpful.

  • ERIC- Educational Resources Information Center: EBSCO database with references to published and unpublished texts on education topics sourced from journal articles, books, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers, and more.
  • Ethnic Diversity Source: Full text sources covering the culture, traditions, social treatment and lived experiences of different ethnic groups in America.  From EBSCO.
  • National Criminal Justice Reference Service Virtual Library: contains summaries of more than 225,000 publications on criminal justice, including federal, state, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, and unpublished research. Subject areas include corrections, courts, drugs and crime, law enforcement, juvenile justice, and crime statistics.
    • Search box is in the upper right.
    • Results come a bigger variety of source types than results from other databases.
    • Results contain less information about each article/report/book etc.
    • Search tips
  • PAIS (Public Affairs): Emphasizes factual and statistical information of interest to the general public related to current public and social policy in fields such as law, education, medicine, business and transportation.  From ProQuest.
    • In your initial searches, it's best to search for your terms in any field except full text.  You can do this by clicking "Anywhere" to the right of each search box, and selecting "Anywhere except full text - NOFT."

Search Tips

  • Use AND to combine different words to find all those words, in any order.
    • race AND policing
  • Use OR to combine similar words or phrases to find either of the words or phrases.
    • segregation OR discrimination
  • Use quotation marks to find words as a phrase
    • "charter schools"
  • Use an asterisk ( * ) to find varied ends of words.
    • disab* will find disabilitiy, disabilities, and disabled 
  • Review "subject headings" or "descriptors" to identify additional and useful search terms.
  • Apply limits or filters to your results (by date, document type, or other). 

Getting to the Full Article

Follow  Check Find It for availability. A new window will open... (Find It button) or the "Find It at UW Madison" link in most databases to:

  • access the full article (when available)
  • determine if the journal is available in print (Library Catalog)
  • request a copy of the article (PDF) if the full article is not available online (Request a Copy link)

If you already have a citation, use the Citation Search to find the full article.

Newspaper databases

  • Newspaper Source Plus: Contains full text for major newspapers such as The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and others.
  • Ethnic Newswatch:  Newspapers, magazines and journals of ethnic, minority and native press, from Asian-American, Jewish, African-American, Native-American, Arab-American, Eastern-European, multi-ethnic communities.
  • New York Times (1851 to present): New York Times newspaper on nytimes.com (1851-present). Includes International, Spanish, Chinese editions. 
    • Requires registration with @wisc.edu email account.
  • US Newsstream:  Current and archival access to U.S. news featuring key national and regional sources, from 1980s to present.

For more newspaper resources, see the Newspapers subject guide.