Research Guides: Urban affairs & planning: Other social science & legal

Search the literature of related disciplines

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.

Business Source Complete is a scholarly business database, providing the leading collection of bibliographic and full text content. As part of the comprehensive coverage offered by this database, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 are included. In addition to the searchable cited references provided for more than 1,300 journals, Business Source Complete contains detailed author profiles for the 40,000 most-cited authors in the database. Journal ranking studies reveal that Business Source Complete is the overwhelmingly superior database for full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Additional full text content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses, faculty seminars (videos), and more.
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.
Political Science Complete from EBSCOhost
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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. You can do cited reference searches and limit to scholarly sources. 1887-present.
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). 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 Portal
An essential resource for public-law research, Hein provides large and wide-ranging collections of historical and contemporary legal documents, articles, and books, including codes, treaties, constitutions, topical collections of government documents, law reviews, legal treatises from the US, Canada, and the UK.
- Current Index to Legal Periodicals indexes publications since 1936 but provides full text to four years before present (like JSTOR).
- Hein content is not limited to narrowly legal topics: includes, for example, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law and books on public affairs published by American Enterprise Institute .
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; interface resembled HathiTrust. Formerly Law Library Microfilm Collaborative. A digital collection of the Center for Research Libraries.
Foreign Official Gazettes from CRL
An official gazette is the legal newspaper of a country, or of an administrative part of a country, 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 wity 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 person.s

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
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. An increasing number of selections from these collections are being made accessible in full text PDF versions via the Library of Congress Federal Research Division (FRD) website.

Grad students should cast wider nets with these

Annual Reviews
Annual Reviews publishes comprehensive, topical literature reviews (HTML and PDF) for 40 disciplines, including social sciences, law, and economics. AR is a useful starting point for graduate and advanced undergraduate research because it synthesizes the vast amount of primary research literature and identifies the principal contributions in each field.
- Fulltext coverage is available for 1939-2017 for all AR "journals" (ie, disciplinary collections); thereafter, although you can search all AR journals content, but VT full-text access is limited to selected AR journals -- use ILLiad to request post-2017 AR articles if they are not available to download.
Oxford Handbooks Online
Oxford Handbooks Online provides scholarly overviews of topics through in-depth articles. We have access to handbooks in philosophy, political science, and psychology.
WorldCat
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The closest thing available to a full, global library catalog, OCLC WorldCat contains all the records cataloged by more than 10,000 OCLC member libraries, including Virginia Tech. World Cat indexes hundreds of millions of citations of books, journal articles, newspapers, magazines, computer programs, maps, musical scores, videotapes, and websites. The most useful versions are
- WorldCat Firstsearch, aka "real WorldCat" to many faculty and librarians because it puts the greatest power in the user's hands. VT only.
- WorldCat.org, which includes a handy location tool for locating what libraries hold an item near any ZIP code. Freely available.
This database offers millions of bibliographic records and also includes records representing 400 languages.This database indexes material from:

Books
Journal articles
Websites and internet resources
Computer programs
Films and slides
Journals and magazines
Manuscripts
Maps
Musical scores
Newspapers
Videotapes

Find resources by format: Theses and dissertations
Extensive directory to sources for locating and accessing US and international theses and dissertations.
- ETDs: Virginia Tech electronic theses and dissertations, part of the VT ETD guide, also locates digitized theses/dissertations that had been submitted on paper and bound.

Urban affairs & planning: Other social science & legal

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