Urban affairs & planning: Other social sciences, legal

Urban Affairs & Planning at Virginia Tech conducts basic and applied research on national and international development patterns, focusing on key forces shaping metropolitan growth such as demographics, environment, technology, design, and transportation.

What's here

As a liaison librarian, Bruce Pencek serves several Virginia Tech social science departments -- but not all of them.. Here are some core sources from other fields that might bear on or deepen your scholarship.

Search the literature of related disciplines

Overton
Overton tracks "gray literature": from white papers, policy briefs, and hearing transcripts from government agencies, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations. It also tracks and links between gray literature and scholarly publications that cite it.
SocINDEX with Full Text from EBSCOhost
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SocINDEX indexes abstracts and full text of journal articles, books, conference papers, case studies, and surveys on all aspects of sociology. Author profiles are provided. You can do cited reference searches and limit to scholarly sources. 1895-present.
EconLit with Full Text from EBSCOhost
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EconLit indexes citations, abstracts, and full text of journal articles, books, dissertations, and working papers on all aspects of economics. You can do cited reference searches and limit to scholarly sources. 1886-present.
Business Source Complete from EBSCOhost
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Business Source Complete is a citation, abstracts, and full-text database that indexes journals; books; financial data; reference works; conference proceedings; company, industry, investment, marketing, and country reports; SWOT analyses; and case studies. Full text is provides as HTML and PDF. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1886-present; most content is 1980s-present.
Military & Government Collection from EBSCOhost
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The Military & Government Collection database indexes citations, abstracts, and full text from journals, news sources, primary source documents, legislative acts and proclamations, and other publications covering all aspects of the military. Full text presented in HTML and PDF. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1975-present.
Military and Intelligence Database from Gale
Gale OneFile: Military and Intelligence indexes citations and full text from scholarly journals, magazines, and reports covering all aspects of the past and current state of military affairs. The database offers content in key subject areas including governmental policies, the socioeconomic effects of war, and the structure of the armed forces. 1980-present.
HeinOnline
The HeinOnline portal offers a large and wide-ranging collection of contemporary and historical legal materials, mainly from the US, including constitutions; statutes and legislative histories, treaties, judicial opinions, regulations and other administrative law, and topical collections of historical law/policy documents. Hein's collections of secondary sources (law reviews and books) address wider bodies of law and more countries than the primary-sources Tech subscribes to.
Political Science Complete from EBSCOhost
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Less comprehensive than Tech's principal database to the discipline,Worldwide Political Science Abstracts from ProQuest, Political Science Complete indexes citations, abstracts, and full text of journal articles, conference papers, reference books, country reports, interviews and speeches, and book reviews on all aspects of political science.
Humanities International Complete from EBSCOhost
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Humanities International Complete indexes citations, abstracts, and full text from journals, books and book reviews, art work and images, performances and reviews, literature and criticisms, poems and short stories, and conference proceedings. Full text is available as HTML and PDF; images are available in a variety of formats. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources.

Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL)
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Despite its formal name, the scope of OADTL is not limited to religious studies: its coverage is wide ranging, taking in the range of topics addressed by the world's religious traditions as well as those of interest to clergy as teachers, counselors, and activists. OADTL brings together freely available articles, books, government reports, working papers and the like, using the familiar OCLC WorldCat Discovery platform

Religion & Philosophy Collection from EBSCOhost
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Religion and Philosophy Collection indexes citations, abstracts, and full text from journal articles, magazines, and book reviews in the field of world religions, biblical studies, religious history, epistemology, political philosophy, moral philosophy and the history of philosophy. Full-text materials are available in HTML and PDF. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1967-present.

Legal databases

Fastcase
Key tool for legal research (notably state and US case law, current statutory and administrative codes and rulings -- see scope of coverage). Search by keyword or citation, and filter by jurisdiction or date. Permits directly searching HeinOnline for law reviews, and includes links from cases to articles cited in them.
Fastcase does not provide proprietary headnotes nor research aids from commercial legal publishers like Lexis or West.

HeinOnline Law Journal Library
In addition to its library of legal scholarship on all topics, Hein offers large and wide-ranging collections of historical and contemporary primary sources in public law, including legal and administrative codes, treaties, constitutions, organized thematically and by source.
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Focus is mostly on the US federal government, but US states and other countries in the common-law tradition are represented; worldwide coverage is available in, eg, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law and World Constitutions Illustrated .
Comprehensive Index of Legal Reports (Law Library of Congress)
Paralleling reports of the Congressional Resaerch Service, these legal research reports provide commentary and recommended resources on issues and events for members of the US Congress.. These reports are provided for reference purposes only and reflect research undertaken as of the date of writing; they have not been updated unless specifically noted. Historical reports can be found in the Publications of the Law Library of Congress.”
LLMC-Digital
Important archive of historical legal and government documents from US and other jurisdictions: constitutions, codes, statutes, court reporters, treatises. Searchable. Displays original documents in full page image; reader interface resembles HathiTrust. Formerly Law Library Microfilm Collaborative.
Foreign Official Gazettes from CRL
In many countries, and sometimes in administrative regions within a country, an official gazette is the goverrnment's legal newspaper, which publishes the text of new laws, decrees, regulations, treaties, legal notices, and court decisions. This portal helps you
- discover where in the US physical holdings exist (using the FOG database) to visit or request through ILLiad
- access (in Digitized Official Gazettes) endangered government documentation from ten African and Persian Gulf nations .
Complements international legal contents in LLMC-Digital.
LII: Legal Information Institute (Cornell) Open-access portal to statutory, administrative, and case law of the United States, US states and dependencies, and foreign jurisdictions. Includes the Wex legal encyclopedia. University-based, but includes advertising.
Guide to Law Online (Law Library of Congress)
Portal of Internet sources of interest to legal researchers covers virtually every jurisdiction in the world. Emphasizes sites offering the full texts of laws, regulations, and court decisions, along with commentary from lawyers writing primarily for other lawyers. .Also includes selected sites from governments and materials related to law and government that were written by or for lay persons.
GlobaLex, from NYU School of Law
Old-fashioned but frequently updated directory to online information sources for International law research, comparative law research, and "foreign" (ie, country-level) law research.

LegalTrac from Gale
Gale OneFile: LegalTrac indexes citations and some fuill text of law reviews and journals, legal newspapers, federal and state case law, laws and regulations, legal practice and taxation, and international law. 1980-present.
Legal Collection from EBSCOhost
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The Legal Collection indexes citations, abstracts, and full-text journal articles and case studies. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. Full text presented in HTML and PDF. 1965-present.
Legal Collection offers full text for more than 300 of the world’s best law journals. This database provides information centered on the discipline of law and legal topics such as criminal justice, international law, federal law, organized crime, medical, labor & human resource law, ethics, the environment, and much more. Full-text journals contained in this database include: American Journal of Criminal Law, California Law Review, and many more. In addition to full text, indexing and abstracts are provided for all journals in the collection. The majority of full text titles are available in native (searchable) PDF, or scanned-in-color. Full text information in this database dates as far back as 1965.
Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1908-1981 from EBSCOhost
The Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective indexes citations to articles and summaries in annual surveys of laws and courts, legal journals, and legal yearbooks. 1908-1981.

Military Legal Resources (from Hein Online) The US Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center & School Library in Charlottesville holds extensive collections of primary source materials and publications in the field of military law. Hein's collection replaces the Military Legal Resources collection previously hosted by the Library of Congress.