Best Bet Databases for African American Studies
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowProvides indexing and abstracts for thousands of journals and other publications. Access broad ranging resources that include full-text journals, monographs, reports, conference proceedings, and video content from the Associate Press etc.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowAccess a wide variety of journal articles in the humanities and other disciplines.
- Oxford African American Studies Center This link opens in a new windowAccess wide-ranging materials that focus on the lives and events that have shaped African American and African history and culture. Comprised of five major encyclopedias and additional reference sources from Oxford University Press.
Common Research Questions for African American Studies
- Reference/ Identifying Research Topics: For good reference overviews, direct students to Oxford African American Studies Center. Articles center the African American experience and contain useful bibliographic information to help students define potential research topics and find the best search terms. They also contain excellent biographical entries on prominent African Americans.
- Building Bibliographies: For more advanced projects, direct students to the Oxford Bibliography for African American Studies. It has excellent overviews of subfields within the discipline.
- Finding African American-Authored Materials: Since African American Studies topic often span many disciplines, students may benefit from general searches within multi-disciplinary databases like JSTOR; however, students often get more relevant results if they narrow their search to journals indexed as "African American." To do this, select "advanced search" in JSTOR and find the "African American" subject under "Journal Filter" (see image below). Although it's not always the case, many of these journals have better representation of works by African American authors. Black Studies Center also has a good selection of Black studies journals, although they are a bit dated.
- Finding Primary Sources: Emory subscribes to a large number of primary source databases that document African American history. The top two that I direct students to are a) History Vault (this contains the records of the NAACP) and b) ProQuest Black Newspapers.
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