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Prof. Schreier's courses: a research guide

A guide to resources for research assignments in Prof. Schreier's courses on Middle Eastern and North African history.

Databases aka Article Indexes

Historical Abstracts
Indexes scholarly articles in history journals about world history after 1450 excluding U.S. and Canada
JSTOR
Searches the full text of a multidiscipllinary collection of scholarly journals, starting with their first issues, making it especially useful for historiography. Use the Advanced Search to filter publication dates or limit to journals in a specific discipline/disciplines (incl. History, Middle East Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies).
BE AWARE OF JStor's "ROLLING WALL": Note that content from the most recent 5 years of most journals is excluded. You can check the Journal Finder to locate more recent coverage of specific journals, and/or supplement your search with the database Project Muse to find more recently published scholarly articles.
Project MUSE
This collection of multidisciplinary scholarly journals is a good resource to use in addition to JStor, since it has the most recent issues of many of the journals that only go up to 5 years prior to the current in JStor. Searches include the full text of articles.

Social Science Citation Index (Web of Science)
Index of articles from scholarly journals in the social sciences. Records include cited references and articles citing the article in the record. This is an especially good tool for identifying seminal articles, diverging views, and intersecting topics and conversations.
The library catalog record for an article provides a link to the Web of Science record for the same article. This can help you find related articles, scholarly conversations, and threads.

Books

Library Search (Vassar College Libraries)
• use Starts With/Browse to search by author or title
On the search results page,
• use Physical Collections to locate print books in the libraries
• use Available Online to limit to ebooks, full-text online, streaming media, and other digital material
WorldCat
Union catalog of the thousands of libraries that participate in interlibrary loan. Use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in the records to find related titles. Books in the Vassar Libraries collection are at the top of the results.

Journals

Articles in scholarly journals must have citations and footnotes, and generally go through a peer-review process.

Book reviews are included in most scholarly journals. A search for a book title in Library Search will also display results for book reviews described as "articles" about that title. Pay attention to citations and notice what scholarly journal your article or review is published in.

To find other journals not listed here, search by keyword or journal title in Library Search.

International Journal of Middle East Studies
The Middle East Journal
Middle East Policy
Journal of Palestine Studies
Journal of North African Studies
Journal of British Studies
If you are researching a country that experienced British colonization.
French Studies
If you are researching a country that experienced French colonization.