Research Guides: Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Guide: Home

Try These Databases First!

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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Full text scholarly journal, trade publication, magazine and newspaper articles, books, book reviews, reports, and Associated Press video content, covering all subject areas.
Contemporary Women's Issues This link opens in a new window
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Full text content from mainstream periodicals, gray literature such as newsletters, NGO reports, the alternative press, and ephemeral literature, with a focus on critical issues and events that influence women's lives in more than 190 countries from the 1960s-present.
GenderWatch This link opens in a new window
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Full text of scholarly and popular articles and gray literature titles focusing on the evolution of gender roles in society. Covers topics related to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies; family studies; gender studies, and women's studies from 1970-present. See also the Diversity Collection to search Ethnic NewsWatch, GenderWatch and Alt-PressWatch in one platform.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Full text of all 2,800+ academic journals on JSTOR that span more than 60 disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, along with millions of primary sources across four collections: Global Plants, 19th Century British Pamphlets, Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa, and World Heritage Sites: Africa. Also explore 3+ million images from ARTstor and over 10,000 open access books. Note: The library does not license any collections of fee-based books from JSTOR.
ARTstor on JSTOR
Existing ARTstor logins automatically work on JSTOR. The separate artstor.org platform will be available until Aug 1, 2024, when it is scheduled to be retired.

Open Access books on JSTOR
More than 10,000 open access (OA) books from 125+ publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, University College of London, and University of California Press.

19th Century British Pamphlets
Nearly 26,000 pamphlets from collections in seven universities spanning more than one million pages. Brings together a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.

New Collections Added Aug 2023
Thematic Collections
Three collections focusing on emerging areas of research and containing multiple types of content, including journals and open research reports. Collections include:
•Lives of Literature - Academic journals devoted to the deep study of writers and texts associated with core literary movements.
•Security Studies - Academic and open policy research on international and national security problems and foreign policy issues.
•Sustainability - Academic and open policy research on environmental stresses and their impact on society. Looks at sustainability and resilience through a broad lens spanning more than 30 disciplines.

Primary Sources
Global Plants
A growing collection of nearly three million high-resolution type plant specimens and related materials from over 300 community contributors around the world.

Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa
27,000 objects and 190,000 pages of documents and images related to the liberation struggles and end of Apartheid in Southern Africa during the 20th Century, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

World Heritage Sites: Africa
More than 86,000 objects of visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage and rock art sites.

Developing a Research Question

Select a topic that interests you and do some pre-research. If you need ideas:
- Look at course readings and class notes.
- Find information using Google, Wikipedia , CQ Researcher, or Credo Reference.
Consider the scope of your topic. If it is too narrow, you might have trouble finding enough information. If it is too broad, you can be overwhelmed with information.
- Think about your assignment prompt while determining the scope of your topic. It is important to consider the size of the assignment and the length of time you have to complete it in thinking about scope.
- Find more on narrowing your topic.
Turn your focused topic into a research question. Know that your research question may change slightly depending on what sorts of resources you find. While you should have a topic or question in mind, allow the sources you find, along with your interests, to help shape and refine your topic further.

Questions to guide the development of your research question:

Is it focused enough to be covered in my paper or project?
Is there enough literature available on this topic?
What is the question that my research is answering?
Am I genuinely interested in this topic?
Is my topic going to be new and interesting to my audience?
How do you determine if a resource has quality, useful information?

Keywords

Brainstorming keywords for your topic will help you refine your topic, find the most information about your topic and save you time by helping you search databases in a more efficient and systematic way.

Why? Different authors will refer to the same concept in different ways. Having a comprehensive list of keywords to search will help you find more information about your topic!

1. Pick out the main ideas in your research question. For example, the main ideas in this research question are in bold: “Are women fit to serve in the military on the same terms as men?"

2. Take each of your main ideas and brainstorm as many synonyms, related words, acronyms, initialisms, and spelling variants as you can. For example, for military:

army
troops
armed forces
service
navy
air force
marines

3. Do this for each of your main ideas. Searching all the variants you can come up with will give you a broader selection of relevant information. Consider making a chart to keep track of which combinations of keywords you have searched for.

Get more help in choosing and using keywords.

4. Know that there is no such thing as a perfect search. Searching is a process, so having a list of potential keywords will help you begin your research. You’ll find that different combinations of keywords will bring up different results in different databases. You can still learn something from every search you perform, so know that this list of keywords can continue to grow throughout your research process.

You can also use what you learn from searching to redefine your research topic or question.

5. Several other specific search techniques can help you use your brainstormed keywords. Take a look at:

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Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Guide

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Try These Databases First!

Developing a Research Question

Keywords

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