International Relations: Finding Articles

The library offers a number of databases that could be useful in your international relations research, and there are several freely available search tools and strategies that may also be useful, depending on your information need. There are also other sources of data and information , so please do not hesitate to contact the library if you would like to discuss your research. 

The tools suggested in this guide include JSTOR, the library's EBSCO article search, Google Scholar, Google advanced search limiting to a specific domain, and a Google advanced search within thinktank websites. 

JSTOR

EBSCO

Google Scholar

Google Advanced Search

This video shows how to use Google Advanced Search to do a domain-level search, such as .mil for US military resources on your topic. It also shows how to use a country-level domain to search resources created within a country related to your topic, and how to leverage Google Translate and the Google Translate browser add-on to get an imperfect translation of coverage of your topic in another language. 

Harvard's Think Tank Search

Search for a specific journal or article title using the library's Journal Titles button

1. Go to https://library.salve.edu/ and click on “Journal Titles”

2. Enter the JOURNAL (NOT the article) title

3. If the library subscribes to the journal, check the date ranges to make sure that you choose the link that has the dates you’re looking for, and then click on the journals link

At this point things will look different depending on where the journal is hosted. Find the volume and issue number for your journal or search within the journal for your article title.

Google Scholar is a great tool for certain type of research questions that require journal articles. If you have a Google account you have a Google Scholar account. You can link this account to Salve's library to have your Google Scholar results directly link to the full-text of articles Salve subscribes to.

Steps:

1. Sign into your Google account

2. Go to Google Scholar settings: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_preferences

3. Select “library links,” enter “Salve Regina” check “Salve Regina University Library – Find @ Salve,” and click Save.

4. Go to https://scholar.google.com/  and search your article title.

5. In the results, you'll see a "Find @ Salve" link to the right of the article. 

Google Scholar does not include all of Salve’s article subscriptions in its results. If you don’t find your article there, search using the library’s journals button.

You can configure a Google Scholar advanced search to find articles in a specific journal or set of journals. Here is a quick video that shows how to do this, and also how to configure Google Scholar to link directly to material that is available through Salve in full text:

Here are the steps:

Click on the three lines to the left of the screen.

Click on "Advanced Search."

In the window that pops up, click in the search box titled "Find articles with all of the words" and enter your search words. Then click in the box "Return articles published in" and enter the title of the journal you'd like to search. Put quotes around the journal title to keep the words together or Google will search all journal titles for all of the words, in any order or permutation, and show you journals you're not interested in.

Then hit enter or click on the blue magnifying glass.

If you would like to search articles in multiple journal titles, do the steps above with one journal and click search. Then add "OR source: "Journal Title" for each source in the Google Scholar search box.

If Salve or Google Scholar doesn’t give a full text option to an article you’re interested in, you can click the yellow box to fill out an interlibrary loan request form. They usually come pretty quickly, between 1 and 3 business days.