Database Search Tips
e.g. metaphysics AND consciousness AND Hegel
OR requires any of the specified words to appear in
each item
e.g. hedonism OR pleasure
NOT excludes terms not desired
e.g. scholasticism NOT neo-scholasticism
Combining ideas
e.g. (Kierkegaard OR Sartre) AND (existentialis* OR relationism)
-
prioritize your concepts to begin your search with
the most important one
-
consider additional concepts to use, if necessary, to
reduce or expand retrieval
-
if the database has a thesaurus, either online or
print, check for suggested terms
Databases
Library databases on philosophy.
Best Bets
- Philosopher's Index
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Philosopher's Index offers complete coverage of all major articles from anthologies and books written in English, Spanish, German, Italian, and French -- over 600 journals from 50 countries published since 1940. Topics include all major fields of philosophy, including Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Logic (including mathematics), Metaphysics (including philosophy of mind, existentialism, and phenomenology), Political philosophy (including philosophy of law), Social philosophy, and the Philosophy of Education, History, Language, Science and Religion. - Intelex Past MastersInteLex Past Masters is comprised of 117 full-text humanities databases that make available cohesive collections of editions, in both original language and in English translation, of seminal figures in the humanities and social sciences. Much of the content is licensed from Oxford University Press, with significant collections from other major scholarly publishers including Harvard University Press, Indiana University Press and Pickering & Chatto. Major university initiatives included in the series are the Connaught Descartes Project from the University of Toronto, John Dewey's works and correspondence from the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Gesamtbriefwechsel from the Brenner Archive at the University of Innsbruck.
- JSTOR
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Full text of backfiles of more than 1100 journals in the humanities, social sciences, sciences and education. Coverage is from volume 1 on, excluding latest 3-5 years. - Academic Search CompleteAcademic Search Complete is the comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 9,810 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
- Academic OneFile Select (Gale)
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Provides access to scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers across disciplines. The database meets research needs in subject areas including the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology
Google Scholar
Philosopher's Index Tips
Having Problems?
Not finding enough material?
- if you have combined several concepts using
- look at each concept and see if you can think of additional synonyms (use OR)
- if you are searching free-text, look at your terms carefully and think of ways to broaden your phrasing
- look at a sample of the items retrieved; if a high proportion is not relevant, add another concept
- sometimes irrelevant records may be eliminated by NOTing out a particular aspect or population
- try limiting by language, date, form of material, particular field instead of free-text