Best bets - databases for finding secondary sources about 19th century America
- America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window Key database for research in American and Canadian history. Indexes journals from the 1914 to the present, containing articles on all eras of American history.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window JSTOR allows you to search across approximately 2,000 journal titles from more than 50 disciplines. It contains complete backfiles of scholarly journals starting with the first issues, many of which date back from the 1800s. Although the majority of titles do not have the most recent 3 to 5 years available in full text, there are some which have the current issues available.Note: Additional content has been permanently added to JSTOR, including archived journal collections and primary resources. Searches performed using the databases page link will include results from the additional sources, as will the link above.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window Cross searching of Science Citation Index Expanded back to 1973, Social Sciences Citation Index back to 1981/82, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index back to 1976.
Try also - additional databases for finding secondary sources about 19th century America
- Historical Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window Historical Abstracts indexes articles that cover world history from the 15th century forward, including military history, women's history, and the history of education. The database includes some linked full text and searches can be limited to articles about a specified historical period.
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Full text database of journals in disciplines such as art, literature, history, political science, and economics. Some full text will come from the JSTOR database, in PDF format.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Good database for most research topics and contains lots of full text, peer reviewed articles. More than 18,000 of the journal titles indexed are peer reviewed and almost all of the full text is. Provides searchable cited references for more than 1,000 journal titles so you can easily see what sources a given article cites.
Finding historiographies and literature reviews
Scholarly journals sometimes publish articles that summarize the scholarship on a topic. Articles like this will discuss many books and articles on the topic, what those sources contributed to the current understanding of the topic, how they might be in agreement or disagreement with each other, and what aspects of the topic remain unexplored.
You can find such articles in the databases by adding one of the following to your searches:
- Historiography
- Literature review
- Historiography OR literature review
Your results might include some false positives, i.e. sources that aren't actually summaries of scholarship on your topic. Pay attention to abstracts and take a look at the full text of the articles you find in order to identify those that do summarize scholarship.
Impact and citation chaining
See this guide's "More research tips" page for information about how you can use the database Web of Science to identify high impact sources or engage in citation chaining.