Political Science - Old Course Guides

Unless your instructor has provided a link to an article, or indicated that it is available on reserve, it is up to you to find the article.

You can find an article by searching in Consort, our library catalog. It is important to remember to do a journal title search for the name of the publication. Do not do a title search for the title of the article.

Let's take an example:

Dallek, Robert. 2010. "The Tyranny of the Metaphor." Foreign Policy 182 (November):78-85.

In this case, you would do a journal title search ("Journal title begins with...") on Foreign Policy. You would then find a catalog record that indicates which databases have this publication. 

You can also find some of the assigned readings through Summon, a discovery tool that searches Consort and many of the library's databases at the same time.

While there are plenty of newspaper, magazine, and scholarly journal articles that discuss the foreign policy of U.S. presidents, where does one go for more primary source material? The answer is the Compilation of Presidential Documents, which includes the full text of proclamations, executive orders, speeches, bill-signing statements, and press conference transcripts.

This collection is organized chronologically (going back to 1993), so it is especially useful if you know when, say, a speech was given. But it is also possible to do an advanced search to see what a president has said or done on a given topic.

While there are many bibliographic databases that you could search, the one that is probably most relevant for this class is International Political Science Abstracts.