LibGuides: Researching a Seminar Paper or Law Review Article: Finding Nonlegal Scholarship

Academic Databases

The databases below are frequently used by students in Penn Law seminars.

More can be found via Biddle Law Library’s E-Resources List, or Penn Libraries' Subject-Specific E-Resources lists of electronic resources according to area of study, including International Relations, Political Science, Business, Economics, and Philosophy.

ABI/Inform Global This link opens in a new window
Large collection of ejournals that covers business conditions, trends, corporate strategies and tactics, management techniques, marketing, and product development. Includes complete runs of key business and management journals.
EBSCO MegaFile This link opens in a new window
General, multidisciplinary fulltext periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Four EBSCO fulltext and bibliographic databases: Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, MasterFILE Premier, and Regional Business News. Coverage varies, mostly from the 1990's - forward
EconLit This link opens in a new window
Provides bibliographic coverage of a wide range of economics-related literature. Covers both theory and application.

Historical Abstracts
Historical coverage of the world from 1450 to the present. Indexes over 2,000 journals published throughout the world, including key historical journals from many countries, as well as hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR specializes in making available the back issues of journals in a wide variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Issues are available both as images and as text, making searching possible both within each title and across the whole database.
PAIS Index This link opens in a new window
Provides bibliographic citations (1915- present) and indexing related to contemporary public affairs and policy issues worldwide, including agriculture, banking, finance, demographics, education, health, environment, planning, public administration, law and legislation, and international relations.
Philosopher's Index This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy and related fields. It covers the areas of ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of mind, as well as material on the philosophy of law, religion, science, history, language and education.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
SSRN collects recent research results found in abstracts and full-text working papers and journal articles in the social sciences, including business, economics, finance, law, and politics. It also includes professional job listings and conference announcements. Access is provided through searchable databases and through subject-specific or source-institution email notification services.
Web of Science
The Web of Science indexes over 8,000 journals in the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Arts & Humanities. You can search by keyword, subject, author, journal title, or author address, as well as for articles that cite a known author or work. The index extends back to 1978 and is updated weekly.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Indexes more than 1500 journals, with are nearly 500,000 records beginning in 1975. Some of the records have full-text links and coverage includes all aspects of political science, as well as international relations and comparative politics.

Other Useful Reference Materials

Oxford English Dictionary
"Complete text of the 20-volume Second Edition, first published in 1989, with its 3-volume Additions Series, published in 1993 (vols 1 and 2) and 1997 (vol 3). Draft material for the upcoming 3rd edition (2010) also included."
Oxford Bibliographies
Bibliographies are provided in over 40 subject areas.
Oxford Handbooks
Oxford handbooks are available in over a dozen subject areas, including philosophy, law, psychology, history, and political science.
Oxford Essential Quotations
Oxford Essential Quotations is an online collection based on the sixth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the second edition of Oxford Quotations by Subject.

Library Catalogs

Search Center
Biddle's online catalog contains information on books, journals and other print and electronic materials related to law in the Biddle collection. Search Center records often contain table of contents information, accessible through a Keyword or Title search. Biddle also offers lists of E-Resources, with databases and websites arranged alphabetically and by subject.

Franklin
The online catalog of the University of Pennsylvania Library System contains information on books, journals and other materials held in the 13 other campus libraries. Please note that Franklin does not include materials held at Biddle; these resources must be searched separately through Search Center.

Even more sources held by non-Penn libraries can be identified via OCLC WorldCat and borrowed through the interlibrary loan process.

Books Online

HathiTrust Digital Library
Brings together the immense collection of materials digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, libraries at HathiTrust partner institutions, and other commercial digitization schemes. Includes searchable access to over 9 million volumes, including over 5 million books and over 240,000 serial publications, with full text access to over 2.5 million volumes.
Google Books
Google Books uses the same search engine as the Google products. If a book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given Google permission, a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text, can be read online. If the book is in the public domain, a PDF copy is normally available for download.
Amazon
Amazon is a useful source for identifying information about the book (ISBN, authors, publication date, summaries, and reviews). You can then search for the titles you locate via Amazon in one of the other library catalogs.