Poli322: American Constitutional Law

Some Useful Information Sources

I. BOOKS

Library catalogs:

EZRA - The Wittenberg University catalog
OhioLINK - Combined catalog of more than 80 Ohio libraries
World Cat Open Access - Combined catalog of thousands of libraries worldwide
(If you can't get it from OhioLINK, fill out the Interlibrary Loan: Book Request Form)

Some helpful books:

In the Reference section:

West's Encyclopedia of American Law. 13 volumes. Ref. KF 154 .W47 2005
Black's Law Dictionary. 7th ed. Ref. KF 156 .B53 1999

In the Main Stacks:

The U.S. Constitution A to Z. Main KF 4548 .M33 2002
The Constitution and Its Amendments. 4 volumes. Main KF 4557 .C66 1999

II. PERIODICALS

Article databases for Political Science Research

International Political Science Abstracts Produced by the International Political Science Association, this database includes current indexing and abstracts of the world's leading journals in political science published from 1989 to the present.
Lexis-Nexis Academic
Contains legal news and reviews, case law, codes and regulations, and more. Completely full text.
Notice the blue buttons on the lower-left side of the start page. You can find more advanced options by clicking to expand the "US Legal" menu.
Legal Collection
 Full text and indexing of law journals.
Women's Studies International
 Indexes multidisciplinary scholarship in feminist research.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts 1975 - June 2006
 A basic index for journal articles in political science, international relations, law, and public administration/policy. Some full text.
Academic Search Complete
 Contains full text for more than 3,600 scholarly publications, plus article summaries for 900 more journals.
JSTOR
 Covers a wide variety of subjects areas. Journals start with the first (oldest) issue, although the most recent few years are not included.
New York Times - Historical
 Full text of the New York Times from its inception in 1851 through 2005. More recent full text in Lexis-Nexis from the present back to June 1980.
America: History and Life
 U.S and Canadian history, pre-history to present.  Has article summaries but no full text.
Or - look at the full list of All Databases.

III. LOCATING JOURNALS

  • At Wittenberg: use Journals the Library Has to search for the name of the journal in which your article was published.
  • If Wittenberg doesn't have the journal: use Interlibrary Loan: Article Request Form

    • Note: Locating journals can be tricky, difficult, and generally exasperating. If you run into trouble, a reference librarian will be glad to assist you.

    IV. INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES

    Each search engine searches a different set of web pages, so the same search query may produce a different result list in each of the following:

    Google
    Yahoo
    Metacrawler
     Google Scholar -
    Caution! This provides references to scholarly articles, but finding the actual article may be difficult and costly.  Also, journal coverage is incomplete and not current. Subscription databases are almost always better.


    V. RECOMMENDED WEB SITES

    Primary Sources

    U.S. Government Sites

    Findlaw

    Guides from other Universities

    VI. FOR DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES:

    American Political Science Association (APSA) Style Sheet
    or, Chicago Manual of Style

    VII. PEOPLE RESOURCES:

    For help, contact Kristen Gibson , who is library liaison with the Political Science Department.
    Or contact the reference desk.

    Return to Thomas Library Main Page

    Compiled by Regina Entorf, Wittenberg University Library
    Last updated 1-9-12/KJG
    © 2012 Wittenberg University