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Soc 497: Honors Colloquium in Sociology

Research guide for honors students in Sociology

About this page

Scholarly books and journal articles will serve as the majority of your resources.

Use books and journal articles to find two kinds of information:

theoretical perspectives that have been applied to your issue
examples of empirical studies that have been done on your topic

Sociological Abstracts

Sociological Abstracts

The best resource for searching the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,700 serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.

Go to Advanced Search

Top box: enter terms that describe your social issue. Try a couple of different terms for your issue, e.g. racism OR discrimination

Other boxes: enter the terms for your population or institution. Put phrases in quotes, and put a different topic on each line. Example:

Search. When the results come back, you can limit your results to Scholarly articles and Books under Source Type on the right side of the screen.

Click the article's title to see the full abstract and other information. Click MGetIt to access the article or find out how to order it.

ProQuest Sociology

ProQuest Sociology
This database provides the full text of more than 300 journals in sociology and related fields. You can search it simultaneously with Sociological Abstracts, or you can search it separately. It uses a different "thesaurus" of subject terms.

To search both simultaneously, go to one of the databases, click Searching: 1 Database at the top of the screen, and check the box next to any other database you wish to add to the search.

Cross-disciplinary resources

Google Scholar @ U-M (with U-M Ann Arbor MGet It Links)
Searches for scholarly documents on the World Wide Web, with the added feature of "Availability at UMichigan" links.

ArticlesPlus
ArticlesPlus is perhaps best described as "Google for the library's online content - without the ads!" ArticlesPlus searches full-text content as well as metadata from a wide variety of sources and returns a list of relevancy-ranked results.

Use the Advanced Search to combine terms, limit to peer-reviewed articles only, and to focus the date range.

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Anyone can search ArticlesPlus to find citations. Access to *linked full text* limited to current UM students, faculty and staff
Web of Science
Useful for tracing which articles have cited which other articles - provides links to all the items in an article's bibliography. Also lets you sort your search results by "times cited" to figure out which articles on a topic had the most influence on the field. (Includes the Social Science Citation Index and the Science Citation Index.)

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Access limited to current UM students, faculty and staff

Resources from other disciplines

ERIC
U.S. Dept. of Education database providing extensive access to educational-related literature.

If your topic touches on other disciplines, you might want to check out article databases that provide access to materials from those disciplines.

To identify the best databases for a discipline, click BROWSE on the library's website and drill down to the discipline of interest.

Here are some examples of subject-specific resources:

Communication & Mass Media Complete
Primary journal index for communication studies; contains full text as well as abstracts.
PsycINFO
Main resource for the literature of psychology and related fields.