CMU LibGuides: Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology: Finding scholarly research

Handbooks and Encyclopedias

CIRP Journal

CMU's Center for International Relations and Politics sponsors the CIRP Journal a print and online journal containing the work of undergraduate and graduate students on international relations and political science research.

Google Scholar

Foreign Policy Research

For a detailed guide on resources useful in foreign policy, visit the Foreign Policy Research Guide.

Government Documents

For a detailed guide on finding government documents, visit the Government Documents Research Guide.

Research Databases

PAIS Index This link opens in a new window
Public affairs, public and social policies, international relations, 1915-present. Database Guide
Political Science Database This link opens in a new window
1985 - current. Access to hundreds of leading political science and international relations journals, providing full-text of many core titles. Over a thousand recent full-text doctoral dissertations, together with working papers, conference proceedings, country profiles, political news and other sources. Database Guide
Policy File Index This link opens in a new window
Access to reports and information produced by prominent policy institutes, "think tank" and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Database Guide
Policy Commons: Global Think Tanks This link opens in a new window
The world’s largest database for public policy, with more than 3.2 million reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources, and media drawn from a directory of more than 24,000 IGOs, NGOs, think tanks, and research centers. It includes over a million pages of premium content from leading publishers and restored from organizations that have disappeared. The resource includes access to the North American City Reports collection - a collection of over 130,000 city documents from the five hundred largest cities in North America, including various municipal and regional organizations.
HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
Legal research database, with numerous libraries covering congressional publications, law publications, treaties, etc.
ProQuest Congressional This link opens in a new window
Congressional materials ca. 1789-present. Full text of hearings, Senate and House documents, the U.S. Serial Set (a collection of U.S. Government publications compiled under directive of the Congress), legislative histories, committee prints, etc. Database Guide
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
An interdisciplinary, international, full-text database of over 18,000 sources including newspapers, journals, wire services, newsletters, company reports and SEC filings, case law, government documents, transcripts of broadcasts, and selected reference works.
EconLit This link opens in a new window
Citations with full-text links for economics research from journals, books, conference proceedings, dissertations, and working papers.
CQ Press Library This link opens in a new window
Search or browse resources on the American government, current affairs, history, politics, public policy, and data analysis for the social sciences. Database Guide.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the literature of the sciences, social sciences and the arts & humanities providing indexes and links to cited references for each article.
Security Issues Online This link opens in a new window
"Security Issues Online delves into conflicts, policies, and relationships that have impacted the global arena throughout modern history. At completion, this collection will include at completion 175 hours of video and 100,000 pages of printed materials (personal papers, organizations, government documents, journals, reports, monographs, and speeches)." - web site.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window
Dissertations and theses from around the world, from 1861 to the present, with full text for most added since 1997.

Searching Databases

Most databases allow the use of AND, OR and NOT to broaden or narrow and search.

AND will narrow the search to include only records with both terms.
OR with broaden the search to include records with either term.
NOT will narrow the search to exclude records with one of the terms.

Truncation: You can use an * at the end of a word stem to broaden your search to include related terms. For example, to search for child, children or childhood use the search term child*

Putting quotes "" around words allows you to search for a phrase. For example, searching language development, without quotes, finds records with both the word 'language' and 'development' somewhere in the record. Searching "language development", with quotes, only find records with the phrase "language development".

Example: How does bilingualism affect language development in children?

NOTE: When you begin doing advanced searching in a new database, look for the Help or Information sections to determine how that database works, and how it may differ from other databases with which you are familiar.