Resources for History Graduate Students

This page has a lot on it. You can use the following anchors (links down the page) to jump straight to a relevant box.

BC Library Catalog

For books we don't have, try searching the Boston Library Consortia or the WorldCat Catalog and ordering through ILL.

WorldCat Catalog

JSTOR is all full-text, and very good for retrospective research in history. But, it does not include all the current scholarship indexed in America: History & Life or Historical Abstracts.

Project MUSE provides full-text access to a large number of scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences published by over 120 of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. In addition, UPCC Book Collections on Project MUSE, launched in January 2012, offer book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE's scholarly journal content. The Project Muse platform allows searching of books and journals in one place.

Historical Abstracts is the corollary index of journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and dissertations pertaining to the study of World History (Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America), time period coverage from 1450 to the present. Publication coverage is 1955–present.

America: History & Life is the premier index of journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and dissertations pertaining to the study of United States and Canadian History, time period coverage from prehistory to the present. Publication coverage is 1910–present.

Some select, usually paywall databases permit "proximity searching," allowing users to look for material that has one word or phrase within a certain number of words to a second word or phrase. 

One of the challenges with proximity searching, however, is that there isn't an established standard for how this should be done. Some databases, for example, use "near" constructions while others use "around" or "within."  

• In Brill collections:
  • ~# (searches for word/phrase one in the stipulated number of words from word/phrase 2)
• In Cambridge collections:
  • ~# (searches for word/phrase one in the stipulated number of words from word/phrase 2)
• In Gale databases:
  • W# (within, will look for word/phrase one within the stated number of words of word/phrase two in the order listed)
  • N# (near, looks for your search terms within the stipulated number of words of one another in any order)
• In Google (any part):
  • AROUND(#) (will look for word/phrase one within the stated number of words of word/phrase two in the order listed)
• In EBSCO databases:
  • W# (within, will look for word/phrase one within the stated number of words of word/phrase two in the order listed)
  • N# (near, looks for your search terms within the stipulated number of words of one another in any order)
• In JSTOR: 
  • ~# (searches for word/phrase one in the stipulated number of words from word/phrase 2)
• In Nexis Uni: note W/# and N/# are interchangeable and must have the /
  • W/# (within, looks for your search terms within the stipulated number of words of one another in any order)
  • N/# (near, looks for your search terms within the stipulated number of words of one another in any order)
• In Oxford products: none
• In ProQuest databases: 
  • NEAR/#  (looks for your search terms within the stipulated number of words of one another in any order)
  • N/#  (near, looks for your search terms within the stipulated number of words of one another in any order)
  • PRE/# (previous, looks for the first word within the stated number of words before the second word)

Note that most Open Access databases do not permit proximity searching.