Secondary Sources
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new windowCredo Reference contains millions of full-text, authoritative articles from hundreds of reference books covering all major academic areas. It is an excellent place to start when learning the basics of any topic and will help to focus your topic, find keywords and people, and discover more in-depth books and articles.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new windowAn illustrated collection of biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond. The biographies—of artists, scientists, writers, industrialists, performers, explorers, criminals, and eccentrics as well as politicians, church leaders, and soldiers, mariners, doctors, and lawyers—are written by experts and provide up-to-date scholarship but are also concise and readable. There are no entries for living persons. The coverage is mainly British, but “British” is not narrowly defined. It covers those who were born and lived in the British Isles, including Ireland; people born there who made their mark in former colonies and in Europe; those who lived in the former colonies when involved directly with British rule; and some people born abroad who lived in or left significant records of the British Isles.
- Biography in Context This link opens in a new windowBiography in Context is a comprehensive database of biographical information on more than one million people from throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas. It combines biographies from printed Gale Group publications with biographies from The Complete Marquis Who’s Who®. The database also includes full-text articles from periodicals.
Basic Search Tips
- Place quotation marks around keyword phrases
"trench warfare"
"Iranian Coup"
- Capitalize Boolean logic connectors (AND, OR).
narrative OR plot
"American Involvement" AND World War I
- Click either "View all formats and languages" or "View all editions" to view all library holdings for a particular title.
- Items at UD appear first in the list of search results. Other items can be requested via interlibrary loan.
- ACLS Humanities E-Book Collection This link opens in a new windowACLS Humanities E-Book HEB is an online, fully searchable collection of more than 5,400 books of high quality in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Frequently cited in the literature, these titles are recommended by scholars and the learned societies of the American Council of Learned Societies.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new windowDigitized editions of 180,000 books and periodicals published in Great Britain and the colonies during the 18th century.
- Gerritsen Women's History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs This link opens in a new windowBooks and periodicals relating to women’s history. Includes two million page images. Covers 1543-1945.
- HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new windowHathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. Millions of items in the public domain (out of copyright) are in full-view for everyone.
- Internet Archive This link opens in a new windowThe Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. It was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
This collection of databases is but a small sample of what UD subscribes to. For a full list of what we have, go to our "Databases" page and search for "Arts & Humanities Databases" from the "Browse by Subject" list.
- America: History and Life This link opens in a new windowAmerica: History & Life is the definitive index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. This authoritative database provides indexing of more than 1,800 academic journals dating back to 1954, with some coverage for titles back to the early 20th century. The database also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events.
- Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new windowHistorical Abstracts is an exceptional resource that covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women’s history, history of education, and more – essential for libraries supporting upper-division and graduate research. This authoritative database provides indexing of more than 2,300 academic journals in over 40 languages dating back to 1953, with some coverage for titles back to the early 20th century.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowJSTOR is a digital library of more than 2,000 journals and more than 25,000 books in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Included are peer-reviewed scholarly journals, literary journals, and academic monographs. JSTOR includes material in more than 75 disciplines including area studies, the arts, business and economics, history, the humanities, law, medicine and allied health, science and mathematics, and the social sciences.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new windowNexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources with an interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
- Project MUSE Journals This link opens in a new windowProject MUSE is a provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. MUSE is a trusted source of complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world’s leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating.
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowSociological Abstracts provides access to the world’s literature in sociology and related disciplines, both theoretical and applied. The database includes abstracts of journal articles selected from over 1,700 serial publications, abstracts of conference papers presented at various sociological association meetings, relevant dissertation listings from Dissertation Abstracts International, enhanced bibliographic citations of book reviews, and abstracts of selected sociology books.
- Women's Studies International This link opens in a new windowAn interdisciplinary combination of nine important files, drawn from a variety of essential women’s studies databases.
Tips & Tricks for Searching for Articles
Finding articles within databases and journals is not the same process you would use to conduct a search in Google or an internet search engine. You cannot type in a question, but rather need to choose specific keywords and phrases to find results. These tips are similar to how you would search for material in DELCAT.
Helpful Ways to Search:
- Use quotations around a phrase to "tell" the database or journal that you want these words to remain together.
- Ex: "American exceptionalism"
- Think of synonyms to your keywords...Especially when conducting historical research, you may need to develop words and phrases that were used during that particular time period, rather than modern-day words.
- Ex: World War I; First World War; The Great War - All would give you different results!
- Use AND/OR to connect words, concepts, and phrases together to receive specified results.
- Ex: World War I AND United States
Use the Advanced Search option in databases and journals to narrow down by date, region, type of document, and more!