Gender and Women's Studies: Researching Topics : Home

Getting started in research on a topic for a gender and women's studies class or examining how a particular issue affects women?  If you haven't already, take a look at the GWS Portal for starting information about the Office of the GWS Librarian, other campus GWS offices, finding resources, managing citations, and more.

After you have explored the portal, then move on to this guide which will direct you to resources pertaining to GWS research in specific subject areas. Use the databases listed below for almost any topic and then click on the subject area from the menu on the left to see suggestions of resources targeted to that discipline.

Contact Karla J. Strand, Gender and Women's Studies Librarian, with any questions or to set up a research consultation.

For almost any GWS-related topic, the following databases can be searched to find journal articles:

• GenderWatch - a gender, women, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) issues database with thousands of English-language full-text articles from over 200 magazines, academic journals, regional publications, and newsletters.
• Women's Studies International - indexes women's studies, women's issues, and gender-focused books, book chapters, journal and magazine articles, dissertations, and reports from throughout the world, starting in about 1972. 
• Academic Search - a multidisciplinary database that provides full text for more than 4,600 journals, including approximately 3,900 peer-reviewed titles.
• JSTOR - a full-text journal database which provides access to more than 1,200 titles in the fields of African-American studies, anthropology, architecture, Asian studies, biological sciences, botany, ecology, economics, education, film, finance, folklore, history, language, literature, mathematics, middle east studies, music, philosophy, political science, population/demography, religion, sociology, and statistics.
• SocINDEX with Full Text - includes full text for 397 "core coverage" sociology journals dating back to 1908 and 150 "priority coverage" journals. It also includes full text for more than 720 books and 6,743 conference papers. Abstracts for more than 800 journals are available back to 1895.
• Alternative Press Index -  includes entries from more than 300 alternative, radical, and left publications. Subjects covered include social and cultural theory, socialism, ecology, democracy, anarchism, feminism, organized labor, indigenous peoples, and gays and lesbians (LGBT), among others.
• Studies on Women and Gender Abstracts - provides paragraph-long summaries of articles in a variety of English-language journals from around the world. 
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - provides free, full-text access to open access scientific and scholarly journals. Open access journals are journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system, and it is not limited to particular languages or subject areas.