Guide to Comparative Politics on the Internet

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7. THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AS A GATEWAY TO THE DEEP WEB

How can you use the internet to identify leading academic literature – books and articles – on particular politics topics? That is the key question you must answer if you are to make effective use of electronic resources. Using a general search engine or media website will be of limited use though Google Scholar Betaand Google Book Search Beta are certainly worth a try.

The central task is to identify the bibliographic databases to which your library subscribes, often at considerable expense, but which are usually free to current students. These resources include access to databases such as the Web of Science which enable you to search through academic journals seeking all articles on a particular topic (catalogued by title or topic). These databases are subscription-only and are not available on the surface web.

Currently, many electronic databases return only a list of titles or abstracts, not the full text, but your library may well subscribe to a particular journal in hard copy or electronic form or have a scheme whereby it can order items from other libraries on request.

These specialist resources are vastly under-used, notably by students who wrongly assume that all information available through a computer must be free to all. Often, too, students move too quickly to primary sources (e.g. what the American government has to say about 9/11) before they have understood the secondary literature (e.g. what other academics have already written about 9/11).

So to make effective use of the global internet, visit your own library’s website first!