Please ask any question that you may have about the library, library services or your research at the Baker-Berry Reference Desk (Baker-Berry Level 1). If you are having problems searching a particular database or if you are having problems finding enough materials, please visit the Baker-Berry Reference Desk. Hours for the Reference Desk are Monday-Thursday: 9AM-8PM, Friday 9AM-6PM, Saturday noon-6PM and Sunday 2PM-8PM. You may also ask questions via email. If you send a question while the reference desk is open, you will get an answer to your question within a few minutes. You may also contact me via email, if you are having problems finding research material for this class or any future Government class: Miles Yoshimura. If you searching for statistics or US Federal government documents or publications, the best person to contact is John Cocklin.
The popular literature is written for a mass audience, while the scholarly literature is written for academics, practitioners in the field and students. The most important distinction between the two literatures is the method by which articles are chosen to be published. In a magazine, an editor usually decides what goes into a magazine. In the scholarly literature, authors submit their articles to a journal. The editor of the journal will then give the article to 2 or 3 other scholars to review. The reviewers will be researchers in the field of the submitted article, and they will remain anonymous to all except the editor. Moreover, the author of the article is not revealed to the reviewers. The reviewers decide whether (1) the article is worthy of publication in the journal, as is; (2) the article needs to be revised and then can be reviewed again; or (3) rejected. A scholar’s peers decide what is to be published; hence, scholarly journals are also called “peer-reviewed journals.” The rejection rate at a major journal can be over 90%. The scholarly literature is a vetted process, which can serve as an important critical filter for students in their determination of which research materials to read.
Importantly, the standards for writing articles are different between the two literatures. The popular literature rarely includes a bibliography, footnotes and a rigorous citing of sources. Scholars and students must include a bibliography and cite what they used and from where or whom they borrowed ideas in the writing of a paper. If scholars and students do not rigorously cite their sources, they can be charged with plagiarism. When students write papers, they are held to the standards of the scholarly literature.
As indicated above, the scholarly literature is a vetted process, in which a good deal of time can pass before an article gets published. The submission of the article, the reviewing process and the printing of the journal can take a year and a half to two years. A published journal article represents research that is already two years old by the time it is published. (The publication of scholarly books is subject to a similar time lag: "university press books" -- for example, Yale University Press, Oxford University Press, etc.) In the subsequent two years after the initial submission of the paper, many events or crises can happen in the field of foreign policy and politics. If you are working on something that happened within the last year, there will not be a scholarly literature for it. Scholarly literature, which takes the event into account, is being researched and will be wrtitten, vetted and published 2 years into the future. The existing scholarly literature can be used to place the event or crisis within theoretical contexts. In the meantime, you will have to rely upon news reports, the popular literature, opinion magazines and journalistic or popular book treatments for reports and analyses of the recent event or crisis. "Opinion" magazines (e.g. American Prospect, National Review, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, etc.) serve an important outlet for scholars and practitioners to quickly publish articles attempting to analyze and explain a breaking event or crisis, to place an event within a theory, or to explain why a theory does or does not explain a crisis. The opinion magazines are an important gray area between the popular and scholarly literatures.
Article indexes or abstracts allow you to search for articles in your field or topic area. An abstract is an index, but it not only lists journal articles, but it will provide an “abstract” or summary of the article.
“Article Linker” makes databases behave like fulltext databases in that you will be linked to fulltext versions of articles, if the Dartmouth Library has the electronic journal and for the years that you want. However, Article Linker isn’t available for all indexes and abstracts.
The electronic article indexes and abstracts listed below will have a variety of user interfaces, and not all indexes will indicate which journal articles are from “peer-reviewed journals.”
If none of these article indexes covers your topic or interests, please see a reference librarian at the Baker-Berry Reference Desk. There are many other article indexes, which are too numerous to list here.
BorrowDirect: Use for BOOKS that Dartmouth does not own and for books that the Dartmouth Catalog indicates are "Missing" or "Checked Out." You will get your requested books within 4 working days. BorrowDirect is NOT for journal articles.
DartDoc: For books not available through BorrowDirect and for journal articles from journals that Dartmouth does not have. You must register for DartDoc before using it. You will receive requested materials in about 4-10 days.
Newspapers Folder (top half is current newspapers)
LexisNexis Academic [fulltext newspaper articles]
Factiva [fulltext articles from newspapers and business periodicals]
Library Press Display
Newspapers Folder (scroll to bottom half)
Mew York Times historical backfile (1851-2004)
Washington Post (1877-1990)
Wall Street Journal (1889-1989)
Listing of Newspaper eResources
Student tutors will help you with the research process for a paper and the writing of a paper: from drafts to the final version. They can also help you to create Power Point presentations and websites. To schedule an appointment with an RWIT tutor (Baker-Berry 183), consult this website: RWIT.
260 newspapers from around the world in fulltext "paper" format. Goes back 60 days.
This folder contains links to fulltext current and historical backfiles of many newspapers -- including the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and many others.