Gender Studies in the University Library: Search engines

On this page you will find an overview of the major search engines and databases for Gender Studies.

The university library finds that researchers and students often like to start with a wide search when looking for scientific literature, for instance by using WorldCat or Google Scholar first. For specific scientific publications on Gender Studies, use the special search engines for this discipline.

In the overview of all digital journals of the Utrecht University Library, you can:

• check the title of a specific journal (in order to search in-depth within that journal)
• check the title of a specific article.

Please note: it doesn't work well for searching articles with keywords. For that, you should better use Google Scholar or one of the specialized databases Gender Studies or Women's Studies International.  

Nexis Uni is an online database that offers full text articles from newspapers and other news resources. International and Dutch newspapers are included, but also regional newspapers and e.g. news agencies. Find out more on search options and other possibilities in Nexis Uni? Check Nexis Uni explained.

WorldCat is the world's largest catalog of library resources from around the world, where you can search at a global, national and Utrecht University level. You will find the UUL collections in WorldCat, together with material from thousands of libraries and publishers world wide. Search WorldCat via an optimised entry offered by the Utrecht University Library.

What is in WorldCat?

- The contents (books, articles, CD's, DVD's and many other types of materials) of more than a thousand libraries from all over the world.
- The Utrecht University Library collection.
- Access to the information in databases for which the university library has a license.

Attention: you can't search all the databases which the library has a license to in WorldCat. Find the full list of search engines here.

Use WorldCat when you want to:
- find books, articles and all sorts of publications, also outside the Utrecht University Library
- find all kinds of editions and translations of a book
- find free full text versions of books

WorldCat has great coverage and offers a lot of options to filter your results.
Sometimes there is extensive additional information available, such as reviews, tables of contents, etc.

In the LibGuide WorldCat  you will find more information.

Google Scholar is a large search engine for scholarly publications. It searches primarily journal articles and, contrary to almost all other search engines, searches the full text. From Google Books the data of a large number of scientific books are included in Google Scholar. Also in this respect Google Scholar differs from classical scientific search engines such as Scopus or Web of Science.

Google Scholar's special features listed:

• you search articles as well as (a selection of) books
• your search is full text, so you will also find sources in which your search terms are only touched upon
• Google Scholar does not tell you what publications are included and what publications are not: you will have to find out by trial and error
• the journal selection is less strict than in Web of Science or Scopus: as a result you will also find non-peer reviewed material
• the order of results is also based on the number of received citations: that is why more recent publications are harder to find; always use the menu to filter on recent years!
• if you want to have links to Refworks you must choose this as your Bibliography Manager in the preferences
  
• only if you access Google Scholar via the Utrecht University Library website you will be shown the UBUlink next to the titles

In the special Google Scholar LibGuide  you will find all you want to know about successfully using this remarkable search engine

Next to general search engines, there are specific databases by topic. For workable results of high quality enriched with abstracts and keywords and with many filter and sorting options, we advise the following UU-licensed databases for Gender Studies:

• Gender Studies Database: more than 1 million records from 1930 to the present, subjects covered in this resource include gender inequality/identity, masculinity, postfeminism etc.
• Women's Studies International: more than 1 million records; subject covered include sociology, history, political science & economy, public policy, international relations, arts & humanities, business and education.

Both seach engines are offered by publisher Ebsco and can be searched combined, so their functionalities are the same.
You can consult one of the tutorials by Ebsco for an introduction to basic or advanced searching.

• We recommend the filter 'Peer reviewed' to select high quality titles.
• However, do avoid the filter 'Full Text', as it covers only a part of all our journal subscriptions. Check the UBU-link instead. 

• Literary Studies: MLA International (Ebsco)
• Linguistics: LLBA (Proquest)
• Philosophy: PhilPapers (website)
• Sociology: Sociological Abstracts (Proquest)
• Psychology: PsycInfo (Ovid)

For more databases to explore high quality secondary sources, first go to the lists with search engines by discipline. Then combine the chosen discipline with the Type 'Bibliographies'.