LibGuides: Research Methods: Resources for Social Scientific Research

Resources for Social Science Research

Best Bets for Sociology, Social Work & Criminal Justice:

Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text contains more than 560,000 records selected from the most important sources within the discipline. Subject areas covered include: criminology; criminal justice; criminal law and procedure; corrections and prisons; police and policing; criminal investigation; forensic sciences and investigation; history of crime; substance abuse and addiction; probation and parole.
Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection is a comprehensive database covering information concerning topics in emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry & psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational & experimental methods. This is the world's largest full text psychology database offering full text coverage for more than 530 journals.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window SocINDEX with Full Text is a comprehensive sociology research database featuring more than 2.1 million records with full text for more than 860 journals dating back to 1908. This database also includes full text for more than 830 books and monographs, and full text for over 16,800 conference papers.
Sociological Collection This link opens in a new window Sociological Collection is a comprehensive database covering information in all areas of sociology, including social behavior, human tendencies, interaction, relationships, community development, culture and social structure. This database provides complete full text for more than 500 important journals, including nearly 500 peer-reviewed titles, dating as far back as 1965.

Very Useful Interdisciplinary Databases:

Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window Academic Search Ultimate offers students a collection of peer-reviewed, full-text journals. The combination of academic journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos meets the needs of scholars in virtually all academic disciplines.
Communication Source This link opens in a new window Communication Source is a comprehensive resource for communication research. The database offers abstracts and indexing as well as full-text content from publications worldwide pertaining to Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric and Discourse, Speech-Language Pathology, Media Studies and other fields relevant to the discipline.
Education Source This link opens in a new window Education Source provides indexing and abstracts for over 2,850 academic periodicals and includes full text for over 1,800 journals, 550 books and monographs, education-related conference papers, citations for over 4 million articles, and over 100,000 controlled and cross-referenced names of educational tests. Coverage spans all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and also includes educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education and testing.
Gender Studies Database This link opens in a new window Gender Studies Database covers the full spectrum of gender-engaged scholarship inside and outside academia. Several thousand links to full-text articles and documents on the Internet are available, including professional journals, conference papers, books, government reports, discussion and working papers, and theses & dissertations. Links also provide access to carefully selected and important websites. This database includes over 921,000 records with coverage from 1972 to the present.
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition This link opens in a new window This database provides nearly 550 scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition also features the AHFS Consumer Medication Information, which covers 1,300 generic drug patient education sheets with more than 4,700 brand names, as well as Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary .

You can view all of our databases on our A to Z list
- You can view only Sociology databases, Social Work databases, and Criminal Justice databases, among others.
I also recommend looking at our Psychology and Interdisciplinary Databases
You should also check out the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice LibGuides for additional tips and tricks

The below resources are scholarly and open access/free. These are all great resources for your project, but if you need something peer-reviewed, you'll have to work harder to figure out if it is or not.

Check out the Peer Review tab on the left to learn more about how to figure out if something is peer reviewed.

Digital Commons Network: Sociology
The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Social Sciences Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals has browsable lists of journals in various areas of the social sciences, broken down by specific disciplines. Instructions on how to browse by subject.
Social Sciences Open Access Repository (SSOAR)
The Social Science Open Access Repository contains both pre- and post-print articles from a wide range of the social sciences. It is certified by the German Initiative for Networked Information (DINI). It has both English and foreign language publications.
eScholarship (University of California)
Both a repository and publishing service, eScholarship provides access to a wide range of scholarly materials from researchers associated with the UC system. Material is browsable by institution and discipline.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
The Social Science Research Network has material from across a broad range of the social sciences and is one of the largest OA repositories in the world. Coverage is also international in scope.

These online book collections provide access to millions of free ebooks that might help you in your research.

The Online Books Page: over 2 million free books
HathiTrust Digital Library: millions of free books
Bartleby.com: repository for tons of classics, including Bartlett's Quotations, Shakespeare, the Holy Bible, Harvard Classics series and more.
Google Books: millions of books outside of copyright
Internet Archive Ebooks and Texts: over 15,000,000 texts - includes journals
Project Gutenberg: over 57,000 free ebooks