Archer Library: Philosophy: Databases

Database Search Tips

AND requires all specified words to appear in each item

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 Masters
InteLex 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.
More than 3 million of the images from Artstor are now available alongside JSTOR’s scholarly content.
Academic Search Complete
Academic 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

Tips for Using Philosopher's Index

Having Problems?

Not finding enough material?

if you have combined several concepts using AND, start again and search only the most important one. Then add the next most important one, and so forth
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

Finding too much material?

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