Getting Started
Purpose of this guide
This guide is designed to help provide you with subject support identifying the most useful resources for Politics and International Relations.
Getting Started using the Library
The best place to start searching for resources for your course is your online reading list and LibrarySearch.
The Library also subscribes to a number of resources that can help provide a useful introduction to a topic:
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies
- Oxford Very Short Introductions Online
- Oxford Reference Politics Collection
Researching for Assignments
For assignments you will need to go beyond your reading list and do your own independent research. The Library subscribes to a number of subject databases helping you to find academic books and journal articles on your chosen topic.
The top resources to search for relevant academic information are;
- Oxford Handbooks Online providing access to the political science book collection
- Oxford Scholarship Online full text access to the political science book collection
- International Political Science Abstract an index database of over 900 journals in Political Science
- Worldwide Political Science Abstracts an index database of journal articles, books and dissertations.
It can also be useful to search the publishers websites for journal articles. The key publishers for Politics are
General databases such as Scopus, International Bibliography of the Social Science (IBSS) and Web of Science are also useful places to search as well as Google Scholar.
Specialist Resources
As well as traditional academic sources you may want to include other information sources such as government documents, newspaper articles, personal accounts and data. Our research skill module will help you identify different types of information, when these might be useful and where to search.
The following resources will be of particular interest to Politics and International Relations students:
- Chatham House Archive publications from the Royal Institute of International Affairs
- Human Rights Online an archive of primary and secondary sources on human rights violations and atrocity crimes around the world from 1900-2010
- Political Extremism and Radicalism in the 20th Century an archive of political extremism and radical thought including campaign propaganda, government records, oral history and more.
The Library’s own Special Collections and Archives also holds an number of collection of interest including:
- The British cartoon archive a national collection of political and social cartoons from British newspapers and magazines
- The Bernard Weatherhill Papers (former Speaker of the House of Commons)
- Hewlett Johnson Papers (former Dean of Canterbury Cathedral and proponent of Socialism)
- Kingsley Wood archive ( Conservative politician)
Online Resources
As well as the resources that the library subscribes to there is a lot of useful freely available information available on the internet. To help navigate this the library has created a reading list with links to some useful websites