Databases can contain a combination of full-text (ready to read online) and citation information that can lead you to articles, book chapters, or books. Specialized databases can help you home in on more relevant sources, and they contain content that SuperSearch misses. It's always a good idea to search in more than one database. Even if there is considerable overlap in content, the different search capabilities and features of each database can help you find different sources. To find additional databases relevant to your research, go to the Library's Databases A-Z list and use the Subjects menu.
Literature
Full-text scholarly journal articles and books on all aspects of literature, along with literary reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographies, and topic overviews) and the full text of thousands of literary works from the 8th century to the present.
Biographies, topic overviews, reviews, and scholarly analysis of authors and works from all genres, eras, and regions of the world.
Scholarly articles on literature, languages, linguistics, film, folklore, and rhetoric, from all cultures.
Women & Gender Studies
Full-text peer-reviewed articles on gender, sex, and sexuality in history, sociology, psychology, education, art, and more.
Peer reviewed articles on women's and gender studies, drawing on gender studies, education, sociology, history, and more.
Peer reviewed journals, magazines and regional newspapers on topics pertaining to sexuality and gender identity, and includes the full text of many historically significant LGBTQ+ publications.
Dates: 1917 CE-Present
Multidisciplinary
Scholarly journal articles and books in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Does not include the most recent 3-5 years of many journals.
Full-text scholarly articles in all disciplines.
Books and journal articles in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
Use quotation marks " " to search words as a phrase. This will narrow your results.
"environmental justice"
Use AND to combine multiple concepts in your search. This will narrow your results.
"environmental justice" AND feminism
Use OR to find different ways your topic could be expressed. This will expand your results. Group these related terms in parentheses, so the database interprets them first. The following search will find results that have any one of the terms in the first set of parentheses along with any one of the terms in the second set.
("environmental justice" OR "environmental racism") AND (feminism OR intersectionality OR ecofeminism)
Use an asterisk * to find variant endings. This will expand your results.
("environmental justice" OR "environmental racism") AND (feminis* OR intersectional* OR ecofeminis*)
Can't find what you're looking for at Wellesley?
Use WorldCat Discovery to search and request directly from libraries worldwide via Interlibrary Loan.
Questions? Interlibrary Loan Guide
If you find a book that is only available in print, see if you can find it in the Internet Archive. You can borrow digitized copies of books for up to 14 days with a free account.
Search Tips: The default search is in "Metadata," which means it's searching in the information about the book, rather than in the contents of the book itself. This will be a more focused search and is particularly useful for finding books by or about a particular author. You can change "Metadata" to "Text Contents" to search for keywords in the full content of all of the Internet Archive's digitized books.
Access is generally limited to one user at a time per book, so try to return the book as soon as you're done to make it available for others.
Your topic seemed so great! So why can't you find any information on it? If you're looking for an all-in-one source that addresses your topic perfectly, you might need a different approach. (From the North Carolina State University Libraries)
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