GNDS 215: Introduction to Sexual and Gender Diversity

Queen's Library subscribes to over 80,000 serial publications (newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals). Use an article index and/or database to find journal articles on your topic. 

Some article indexes/databases contain full text of the and those that don't usually provide links to the full text if it is available via other databases in our collection.

Use a discipline-specific index or database to ensure that the research you are finding is the most relevant to the discipline you are studying. The two major databases that specialize in Gender Studies literature are:

Gender Studies
Gender Studies Database provides interdisciplinary coverage of gender-related topics, including women's studies, men's studies, ethnic studies, health issues and sexual diversity.

Coverage: Scholarly, popular, and internet publications, including journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, dissertations and studies.

LGBTQ+ Source
Provides scholarly and popular LGBTQ+ publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including monographs, magazines and newspapers. It also includes a specialized LGBTQ+ thesaurus containing thousands of terms

Academic Search Complete
A multi-disciplinary index to more than 10,900 publications including peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, monographs and reports. Approximately 50% of the journal titles also contain the full-text of articles.

Sociological Abstracts
Covers sociological topics within a range of social science disciplines. Coverage includes journal articles, books, dissertations, conference proceedings, and reviews.

Understanding how databases interpret your keywords will allow you to execute more specific searches, thereby saving you time while retrieving more relevant results. Databases, including Omni and Gender Studies Database, as well as search engines such as Google, use Boolean operators (AND OR NOT). 

• Identify the essential keywords that best describe your topic
  •   Example:  sports   gender  diversity
• Connect keywords using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
  • AND is the most common Boolean operator. Databases, including web search engines, assume AND between each keyword unless otherwise specified (with OR, for instance) - so if your keywords include a phrase, it is best to place quotation marks around phrases in order to keep the phrase words together. For example, "sexual diversity"
  • AND is used to combine keywords so that your search results must contain all of your specified keywords (narrows your search)
    • Example: sports AND "sexual diversity"
  • OR is used to broaden your search results. When you want to find material containing either or any of the keywords, use OR to combine synonyms and related terms. Note that a Boolean keyword search in Omni requires parenthesis around concepts you are OR-ing
    • Example: (race OR class OR gender) AND "sex workers"
  • NOT is used to exclude whatever concept word follows NOT (you will likely find that you seldom, if ever, need to use NOT