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Politics

A library guide to resources for Politics

Library Website - journals

Image of the Library search box

Use the Library website to search across multiple databases:

Choose from the different search options:

Find books - search for print books in the Library and some eBooks.  Try searching by author surname and a few keywords from the book title, or the book title, if searching for a specific book. Use keyword searching to find books on a particular topic.

Find books and articles - search by keywords to find books, some eBooks and journal articles across multiple electronic databases.

Advanced search - this is the recommended Library search option to use when searching for books and journal articles as it provides more options to build your search and refine your search results.  Search by keywords to find books, some eBooks, journal articles and other sources across multiple electronic databases. 

You may also want to search some of the databases individually.  These can provide different search options and not all of the database content is available through the Library website search.

Useful databases

Research databases contain abstracts, journal articles and conference papers on specific subjects. The databases listed below are likely to be most useful for Politics, but you can find the full list of all the research databases which the Library subscribes to on the databases page.

Additional databases for Politics

Searching tips

  • Identify the main concepts and keywords from your research question / topic area.
  • Think of any alternative keywords, synonyms or abbreviations.
  • Combine terms with AND to narrow the search e.g. political participation AND young people (this will find results that contain BOTH terms).
  • Combine terms with OR to broaden the search and look for alternative keywords / synonyms e.g. young people OR youth (this will find results with EITHER term). 
  • Consider that some words have British English and American English spelling variations e.g. globalisation / globalization.  Wildcards can be used when searching for different spelling variations.  Look at the Help facility on a database to find out which wildcard symbols can be used. 
  • Truncation.  Putting * at the end of a word stem will retrieve all forms of the word.  It can be useful for searching for singular / plural variations of words or other alternative endings .e.g. vote* would retrieve vote, votes, voted, voter, voters. 
  • Phrase searching. Use speech marks " " around words to search for a phrase rather than individual occurrences of each word e.g. "pressure groups".