Databases

Use to locate citations, abstracts, and full-text articles

All are available to researchers with a Penn State Access Account via the Libraries' Databases by Title (A-Z List).

• Ethnic NewsWatch
  Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW) is a comprehensive full-text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. Continuously growing since 1991, with archival material back to 1985, Ethnic NewsWatch is now a collection of more than 470,000 full-text articles from over 200 publications. Searchable in both English and Spanish, with titles in both languages and more than 100,000 articles in Spanish, ENW offers in-depth coverage of a wide range of current and retrospective topics easily accessed using free text and fielded searching.
• International Index to Black Periodicals Full Text
  IIBP Full Text draws its current content from more than 150 international scholarly and popular periodicals in Black Studies and contains full-text coverage of 40 core Black Studies periodicals. It covers a wide array of humanities-related disciplines including art, cultural criticism, economics, education, health, history, language and literature, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and sociology among others.
• American National Biography Online
  The American National Biography Online offers portraits of more than 17,000 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. The online version reproduces the full text of the original 24-volume set published in 1999, with new and updated entries added regularly. The online edition features thousands of illustrations, hyperlinked cross-references, links to select web sites, and powerful search capabilities.
• Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights
  "a complete electronic record of United States Commission on Civil Rights publications" that are held in the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland School of Law.
• JSTOR
  Electronic Journals available through the Web to Penn State scholars in the areas of African American Studies, African Studies, History, Political Science, and more.
• Gale Virtual Reference Library
  Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) contains searchable full-text of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources in many different subject fields. The "Multicultural Studies" section includes titles such as African American Almanac, Contemporary Black Biography, and the Encyclopedia of Black Studies.
• America : History and Life
  America : History and Life includes annotated or abstracted references to American and Canadian history. Published since 1964, the database includes over 2,000 journals worldwide, including state and local historical journals as well as historical articles from hundreds of major humanities and social science journals. It also includes thousands of book and media reviews, citations to published books, and dissertations.
• Sociological Abstracts
  Index for English language journals in sociology, social work, and other social sciences. Provides abstracts for articles and is international in scope.
• ProQuest Direct (newspapers, journals, business)
  ProQuest Direct indexes more than 5,000 magazines, journals, and newspapers. It contains full text (word file with no photos or tables) or images (looks like real paper publication) to more than 2,000 journals, and full text to more than 150 newspapers.
• Social Sciences Citation Index
  Social Sciences Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index to the journal literature of the social sciences. It covers 1400 social sciences journals. The index can be used to look up either a specific author or a particular publication to see how many articles in the database cited that author or publication. The index can also be used to find related articles (articles that have at least one reference in common).
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
  This is an index covering arts and humanities journals. It also provides users with the ability to track known citations in the literature.
• Dissertations & Theses
  Dissertation Abstracts is the primary source for doctoral dissertations (and selected master's theses) from over 1000 North American and European universities. Includes a link to the UMI full-text dissertation pilot project.