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- International relations & security
- Subfield: Comparative politics/area studies
International relations & security: Subfield: Comparative politics/area studies
What's on this page
This guide focuses on principal research resources in a subfield of political science. It is supplements the main subject guide for political science and international studies. The Other political science research guides tab is a menu that connects you to related research guides for the major subfields of the discipline and for related programs in the VT School of Public & International Affairs.
Resources listed on this page are clustered into key databases for accessing scholarly literature (including a box of region-oriented databases); background information and reference sources; contact information for the subject librarian; and tabs identifying additional information.
Parts of this guide are also available in multiple subject guides: Social data sources, News/journalism/streaming media, Advice for searching/citing/engaging with related scholarly literatures, and Accessing library resources from off-campus.
Start here to find scholarly literature
- Worldwide Political Science Abstracts from ProQuestWorldwide Political Science Abstracts indexes citations and abstracts from journal articles, books, essays, book reviews, working papers, technical reports, theses, and dissertations in the social sciences related to politics. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1975-present.
- Historical Abstracts from EBSCOhostHistorical Abstracts indexes citations, abstracts, and full text from journals, books, and dissertations that cover 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. Full text available as HTML and PDF. The database allows limiting results to specific time periods (not just publication dates). You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1800s-present.
Region/geography-oriented online resources
- EIU ViewpointA key resource for political economy and area studies/comparative politics, EIU Viewpoint integrates Economist Intelligence Unit Country Reports and other forecasts, analyses, news, and data at the global, regional, and country level for almost 200 countries. Some content updated daily. "Two-Year Forecasts" continue approach and format of the former Country Reports; "One-Click Reports" resemble the forecasts but conspicuously do not provide tabular data. Data are interactive and include some visualizations; tables can be exported to Excel. Coverage goes back to 1996. EIU is phasing out the old, less comprehensive EIU.com platform. as
- Economist Intelligence Unit Country Reports Archive, from ProQuest provides digitized versions of original print reports, 1952-1995.
- The best place to read the weekly Economist newsmagazine is the edition in the ProQuest One Business database. For complete coverage from three years before present back to 1843, see the Economist Historical Archive from Gale.
- Africa Knowledge Project The Africa Knowledge Project indexes the full text of articles, reports, dissertations, short stories and folktales, plus audio and music files on Africa and the African diaspora. 1968-present.
- African Books Collective Online African Books Collective (ABC) is an African owned, worldwide marketing and distribution outlet for books from Africa – scholarly, literature and children’s books. The publishers from across the continent who are part of the collective have over its 30 year history contributed some 3000 titles, which continue to be available in print. Over 2000 of these are available digitally on this platform. New titles are added regularly. Users may need Adobe Digital Editions to read downloaded ebooks.
- Africa Commons from Coherent Digital Africa Commons is a platform for discovering African historical and cultural materials held by organizations around the world, including libraries, museums, and archives, and then it links outward to the web repositories where the documents are located. Material types include books, magazines, newspapers, historical periodicals, government documents, manuscripts, letters, diaries, posters, photographs, ephemera, art, music, videos, oral histories, and more.
- Europeana Digital facsimiles of millions of items from a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums, including books and manuscripts; photos and paintings; newspapers, television and film; sculpture and craft; diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings. Links to related sites for sharing and doing computational analyses of cultural heritage data.
- American Bibliography of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ABSEEES) from EBSCOhost American Bibliography of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ABSEEES) indexes citations and full-text information on East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Subject areas covered include social sciences and education, humanities and the arts, and business and economics. Sources indexed include journals, books, dissertations, online resources, and selected government publications published in the U.S. and Canada. 1989-present.
- Bibliography of Asian Studies from EBSCOhost BAS indexes citations from journal articles, books, book chapters, conference proceedings, and reports on the social science and humanities aspects of East, Southeast, and South Asia. 1971-present.
- South Asia Commons from Coherent Digital South Asia Commons is an index and repository of South Asian books, historical journals, video, audio, newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries, and other primary-source materials. In addition to indexing thousands of openly available collections, it contains over 4.5 million pages of proprietary (in-copyright, licensed) books, journals, and related materials from the region, covering India, Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.
- South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) from Center for Research Libraries SAOA provides digitized primary and secondary source materials in multiple south Asian languages, including newspapers and magazines, pamphlets, creative works, and government documents.
- LatAm-Studies Full-Text Online LatAm-Studies gathers texts specialized in social sciences and humanities about 46 countries in the Latin American and the Caribbean regions. The studies cover a wide variety of specific topics such as finance, literature, environment, history, law and culture. Also available in Spanish: LatAm-Estudios Texto Completo en Línea.
- Digitalia Hispanica Digitalia Hispanica provides fiction and nonfiction ebooks, journals, and thematic collections in Spanish. Ebooks can be downloaded in PDF and ePUB for 20 days.
- ClasePeriodica from FirstSearch ClasePeriodica indexes citations to articles, mostly in Spanish, from materials published in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Users have the option to search all the citations in the combined ClasePeriodica database, or to limit their search results to citations from either Clase (humanities and social sciences) or Periodica (sciences and technology). 1975-present.
- Fuente Académica from EBSCOhost Fuente Académica is a collection of full-text, scholarly journals from Latin America, Portugal and Spain, some back to volume one. Content is available as PDF. All major subject areas are covered with particular emphasis on agriculture, biological sciences, economics, history, law, literature, philosophy, psychology, public administration, religion and sociology. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1922-present.
- Informe Académico from Gale Informe Académico provides access to full-text Spanish- and Portuguese-language scholarly journals and magazines. 1980-present.
- Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture from Gale This database provides full-text books, pamphlets, and other primary sources about the history and culture of Brazil, Portugal, and Spanish America. Topics include politics, literature, economics, indigenous peoples, religion, and geography. 1801-1983
Overviews and reference works in area studies and comparative politics
- Oxford Research Encyclopedias : International StudiesThis project is the latest collaboration between Oxford University Press and the International Studies Association. It brings newly commissioned articles together with existing and revised articles from the ISA's International Studies Encyclopedia (2017) to form a leading-edge, continuously updated digital resource.
- Gale Ebooks Gale Ebooks is a collection of searchable ebook reference works. You can search within a particular work or across the entire collection. Individual articles from these sources are presented in HTML and PDF. Illustrations, photos, maps, and multimedia content is often included.
- International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2d ed) by Comprises over 3,900 articles, commissioned by 71 section editors, and includes 90,000 bibliographic references as well as comprehensive name and subject indexes; more than 80 percent of the chapters are new or updated since the original text. Both its format and integrated chapters encourage discovery and map contexts and connections within the social and behavioral sciences. Some experts prefer the first edition (2001).ISBN: 9780080970868Publication Date: 2015
Social Sciences & History Librarian
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Interlibrary Loan Services
All current Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff, regardless of your location, may request through ILLiad for materials:
- not owned by Virginia Tech (books, articles from journals and conference proceedings, book chapters, standards, and technical papers)
- owned by Virginia Tech but are unavailable for use (print books)
- owned by Virginia Tech and available in print (scans of articles from journals and conference proceedings, book chapters, standards, and technical papers)
We ship requests via UPS to users outside the immediate Blacksburg area (Montgomery, Giles and Pulaski counties).
Articles, book chapters, and many technical papers are delivered in PDF format to your ILLiad account. Occasionally, due to copyright restrictions, a paper copy of an article or standard is held for your at the Newman User Services Desk or sent o the mailing address listed on your account.
Temporary, trial access only -- use while you can
The University Libraries at Virginia Tech regularly secure short-term, trial access to online resources in order to gauge their appropriateness to our university's teaching and research missions. These trials run in October, February, and sometimes April. Most trials run 30 days.
This box highlights some of these opportunities as they come available. All active trials are listed in a sidebar in the main Databases A-Z directory and as a tab atop this libguide.
Each entry includes a link to a user survey. I and other subject librarians invite you to email us moredetailed assessments of trial resources. Responses from the Virginia Tech community are vital to the library's deliberations about whether and when to acquire or enhance databases and the like.
As appropriate I will list all currently active trials and user survey links in a resource trials tab in this and my other libguides. Entries for trials I may include in here as elsewher in the body of my libguides will go away when the trial period ends.