Area studies and comparative politics: Essentials -- start here

As pursued in the United States, area studies and comparative politics traditionally have dealt with the politics of countries and global regions other than the US.

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 ProQuest
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Worldwide 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.
The database is building on the merged backfiles of Political Science Abstracts, published by IFI / Plenum, 1975-2000, and ABC POL SCI, published by ABC-CLIO, 1984-2000. Over 1,700+ titles are being monitored for coverage; of these, 67% are published outside the United States.

The references cited in the bibliography of the source article have been included for citations to core journals in political science, added to the database since 2001, and for all journals added since 2004. Each individual reference may also have links to an abstract and/or to other papers that cite that reference; these references are linked both within Worldwide Political Science Abstracts and across other social science databases from ProQuest. All records added since 2000 are indexed using a thesaurus of over 3,000 terms.

Major areas of coverage include:

Comparative politics
Developing nations
Disarmament
Economic policy
Electoral systems
Environmental policy
Government/Political systems
History and theory of political science
International relations/trade
Labor relations
Military policy
Methodology and research technology
Political behavior
Political economy
Political psychology
Politics and law
Politics and communication
Politics and religion
Politics and society
Public administration
Security and defense
Welfare systems
Historical Abstracts from EBSCOhost
Historical 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.
CLIO Notes for Historical Abstracts will guide you through subjects in World History since 1450 (excluding the United States and Canada) by allowing you to browse through chronologies and brief summaries of significant events and themes in modern history. On the main screen you will find a list of majors time periods and events. Each of these is further divided into subtopics that display informative essays and suggestions for further research. Linked subject terms are also provided that will allow you to search the entire Historical Abstracts database for articles, book citations and dissertations.

The historical period limiter searches the time span of the event described within the record. There are two options to select for era: "b.c.e. (BC)" and "c.e. (AD)"; where b.c.e. refers to Before the Common Era and c.e. refers to the Common Era. If no era is selected, the search limiter defaults to "c.e. (AD)". To search any historical period Before the Common Era, the "b.c.e. (BC)" value must be selected before clicking the search button. It is possible for a record to include more than one historical period. Please note that the year 0 is not searchable.

1950 c.e. - 1960 c.e. will return results that occur between 1950 and 1960 including any events that encompass part or all of the historical period. (For example, a record with the time span 1900-1999 will be included in the above search).
1950 c.e. in the first edit box will return results from 1950-present.
2000 c.e. in the second edit box will return all results up to the year 2000 c.e.
1929 c.e. - 1929 c.e. will match the exact year of 1929 c.e. Any records that encompass this year in their range will also be included in the results.

Region/geography-oriented online resources

EIU Viewpoint
A 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.
The Africa Resource Knowledge Project, known as ARC Knowledge Project is an initiative by Africa Resource Center, Inc. Dedicated exclusively to the academic research on Africa and the African Diaspora, the knowledge project is a centralized virtual repository that functions both as a publishing and distribution platform. Constructed as a virtual whirlpool, the dynamic environment features manuscript submission and monitoring, progress review tracking, contextualized user-centered rich modules, and syndication.
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.
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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.
Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains nearly 900,000 records on all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.
The most important 100+ periodicals in Asian Studies or on Asia as identified by the BAS staff are indexed as soon as they are published for immediate inclusion in BAS. In fact, the total number of indexed journals is many times that amount. Selected Asia-related citations from many other journals are also included when applicable. In addition, various special projects have contributed substantial numbers of additional records to the database (among them journals on Southeast Asia dating as far back as 1779).
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.
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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.
Users enjoy relevant search results due to detailed abstracts in multiple languages and EBSCO's comprehensive indexing of every article. Fuente Académica is updated on a weekly basis and currently offers the full text for more than 500 publications from 18 countries.
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: Oliveira Lima Library from Gale This database provides full-text books, pamphlets, and other primary sources about the history and culture of Brazil, Portugal, and Spanish America. This archive covers a diverse range of topics including colonialism, the Brazilian independence period, slavery and abolition, the Catholic Church, indigenous peoples, immigration, ecology, agriculture, economic development, medicine and public health, international relations, and Brazilian and Portuguese literature.

Overviews and reference works in area studies and comparative politics

Oxford Research Encyclopedias : International Studies
This 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 James D. Wright, ed. 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: 9780080970868
Publication Date: 2015

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