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Gender and Global Health (GHCS 300R)

Spring 2013, Dr. Michelle Parsons

Social Sciences/Public Policy Databases (scholarly articles & NGO and government reports)

Some of these databases focus on scholarly articles. Others also include government and NGO reports and links to organizations. Don't forget you can also find great reports at the WHO and CDC websites.

Places to Start

Annual Reviews Online
Review articles (that review the existing literature on specific topics) in the areas of biomedical, physical, and social sciences. This is a really great place to start your research. It includes fantastic bibliographies that can lead you to related articles/books.

Web of Science
Multidisciplinary database covering the top journals in science, social science, and the arts & humanities. GREAT database for anthro-related topics!

Popline
Focus on reproductive health, family planning, health policy, AIDS, environmental health, public health, and development. Includes scholarly articles, published & unpublished reports. [NOTE: THIS DATABASE CAN BE SLOW!]

Gender and International Development Sources

Gender Watch
Provides publications that focus on the impact of gender across a broad spectrum of subject areas.

Women's Studies International
Covers the core disciplines in Women' Studies and the latest scholarship in feminist research. Includes sociology, history, political science & economy, public policy, international relations, arts & humanities, business and education. Sources include: journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, theses, dissertations, NGO studies, important websites & web documents, and grey literature.

PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) International
Indexes books, periodicals and selected local, state, national, and international government documents in the areas of public policy, social policy and the social sciences.

ELDIS Gateway to Development Information
Includes research reports, working papers, discussion papers, conference papers, statistics, case studies, policy briefings, etc. related to development that concentrate on information covering countries in the Southern Hemisphere (also includes items on other regions if the information could be applied to Southern-based research). The editors select and abstract full-text online documents from more than 4,500 different publishers focusing on materials which are of strategic, policy or practical interest for development practitioners. The database includes country profiles as well as 30 subject-focused guides. All documents are available free of charge.

Additional Resources

Anthropology Plus
Unites Harvard's "Anthropological Literature" and the Royal Anthropological Institute's (UK) "Anthropological Index". It indexes articles and essays in over 2500 journals and edited works on all aspects of anthropology and archaeology (in English and other European languages).

  • NOTE: Anthro Plus is a bit difficult to search -- it does not search abstracts or full-text (but does link to full-text) so when you search you are only searching titles and a few keywords assigned to each article. To get better results, try using general/broad search terms.

PubMed
A service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 14 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.

Google Scholar
Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Look for links to full-text at Emory. NOTE: Content indexed by Google varies in quality -- use caution when selecting resources.

Sociological Abstracts
Indexes sociology and sociological topics in anthropology, economics, education, medicine, community development, philosophy, demography, political science and social psychology.

SOCINDEX  Similar to Sociological Abstracts

Global Health
Comprehensive, international coverage of the core public health literature as well as significant unique content (compared with the other mainstream health databases) particularly in the areas of tropical medicine, infectious diseases, vector control, food safety and epidemiology.

HURISEARCH (Human Rights Information and Documentation System)
Portal to quality human rights information on the web. A web research tool that increases the visibility of information published by human rights organizations, in particular small local organizations with first-hand information. Provides direct access to the content of over 3000 human rights websites and filters out the non-relevant content: only the pages from websites with a main focus on human rights are indexed. Includes over 50 languages. Includes health information.

Area Studies Databases

These multidisciplinary databases focus on articles about specific regions. Some good ones are listed below.  Others are available via the drop-down "Find by subject" menu (choose "Area Studies") on the Databases webpage.

Africa-Wide: NiPAD (Africa -- primarily South Africa)

Bibliography of Asian Studies  (East, Southeast, and South Asia)

Amercian Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (ABSEES) (East Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union)

Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) (Latin America)

Index Islamicus (the Islamic world including the Middle East, main Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, and Muslim minorities elsewhere.)