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Good Starting Points

If you are searching for information on a particular subject or within a specific discipline, choose the appropriate Areas of Interest on the Database Menu and begin your search. Areas of Interest generally correspond to fields of study at Penn.

If you don't know where to begin, try:

Ebsco Megafile

General, multidisciplinary fulltext periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals. 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, but also including some much older journals and magazines.

Periodicals Contents Index

PCI indexes journals in the humanities and social sciences in English as well as in many other Western languages. Journals are indexed from their initial volume — some as far back as 1770 — through 1995. PCI includes only citations to journal articles; there is no full text. Once you find articles relevant to your topic, search for the journal titles in Franklin, the Library Catalog.

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. Once you find articles relevant to your topic, search for the journal titles in Franklin, the Library Catalog.

As you search you will likely discover that your topic is included in journals of a particular subject or discipline (e.g. psychology, history, business). You can then return to the list of Communities of Interest to locate subject-specific databases that should provide in-depth coverage of your topic.

Online Guides for Research

These are subject-specific and provide information to help you get started researching a topic:

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