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SOCY 429: Pandemic Surveillance

A library research guide to support SOCY 429: Pandemic Surveillance

Finding Articles

Use an article index to find journal articles on your topic. Articles are smaller in scope than books and can therefore focus on more particular aspects of a given topic. Since articles are faster to produce and publish, the most up-to-date scholarly research often appears in this form.

Get it at Queen's buttonSome indexes and databases contain the full text of journal articles, but if the full text is not readily available, click the "Get it" button.

Types of Articles

In addition to scholarly journal articles, many article indexes and databases include citations to book chapters, magazine articles, book reviews, etc. Typically, for research assignments, the expectation is that you should be using scholarly, peer reviewed journal articles. Peer reviewed journal articles have gone through an anonymous formal vetting and editing process, unlike articles in magazines or newspapers which are accepted at the discretion of a single editor. 

Most academic library databases, such as Sociological Abstracts, provide options to restrict search results to peer reviewed scholarly journal articles. 

If your assignment permits non-scholarly sources (for example, recent articles from magazines such as Wired and newspapers such as the New York Times) consider using either a newspaper database such as Factiva or a large multidisciplinary database such as Academic Search Complete or Canadian Business and Current Affairs.

Article Indexes & Databases

There are several indexes and databases relevant to surveillance studies.  Key databases to note are:

Sociology:

Sociological Abstracts
Comprehensive index to the international literature in sociology and related disciplines.

Sociology @ ProQuest 
Searches three databases: Sociological Abstracts, ProQuest Sociology, and IBSS:  International Bibliography of the Social Sciences.

Communication Studies
Communication and Mass Media Complete
A database of scholarly literature on all aspects of communication and mass media studies.

Political Studies
Political Studies @ ProQuest
Searches four databases simultaneously: PAIS, Worldwide Political Abstracts, ProQuest Political Science, and IBSS.

Geography
Geobase
The database for human and physical geography.

Multidisciplinary Databases

Academic Search Complete
A multidisciplinary index (with abstracts) to more than 10,000 publications including peer-reviewed journals, popular magazines, conference proceedings, monographs and reports.

Social Sciences @ ProQuest
Comprehensive coverage of literature published in the social sciences disciplines. 

Web of Science
Includes Social Sciences Citation Index.

Newspaper Databases

While not scholarly sources of information, you may want to supplement your research or understanding of your particular topic by consulting newspapers. Queen’s Library subscribes to local, regional, national and international news databases. These databases provide significant date coverage (unlike the free news sites on the web) and allow for a variety of search capabilities ideal for academic-level research.

The following are very useful for your coursework in SOCY 427:

For more news resources, consult the library's guide to major news indexes and full-text news resources at Queen’s Library.

Search Engines

Omni
Omni is the library’s catalogue and search engine, which enables a simultaneous search of the library's print holdings and many of the library’s online collections, including articles, journals, conference proceedings, digital primary source material, electronic books and newspapers, theses and dissertations, multimedia and more, from a single search box. 

Google Scholar
Google's scholarly search engine.  Google Scholar searches for scholarly materials including journal articles, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Because of the variety of sources that Google Scholar uses, not every result you’ll see is necessarily peer-reviewed. It is still important to evaluate the sources for credibility. 

Enabling the "Get it" links

On campus: access to Queen's resources is automatic via the Queen's library link to Google Scholar.
Off-campus: access Google Scholar through the Queen's library link where you will have to enter your NetID and password or if you go to Google Scholar directly (https://scholar.google.ca) you will need to configure your Google Scholar preferences to allow automatic access to our Library subscriptions to journals and databases.

Scholar Preferences

settings gearClick on the Settings "gear" located in the upper right hand corner of the Google Scholar search page to view Scholar Preferences (choose Library Links and add Queen's University, Kingston - Get it ). Click save.