Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: Databases

Best BetCovers women’s studies and feminist research in areas including sociology, history, international relations and humanities. Some full text links.

Best Bet LGBTQ+ Source is the definitive database for LGBTQ+ studies. It provides scholarly and popular LGBTQ+ publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including monographs, magazines, newspapers, and videos. It also includes a specialized LGBTQ+ thesaurus containing thousands of terms.

In the late 1800's, Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and women's rights. By the time their successors finished their work in 1945, The Gerritsen Collection was the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world, with materials spanning four centuries and fifteen languages. This online resource delivers two million page images exactly as they appeared in the original printed works.

Women: Transnational Networks--including a wide array of primary source documentsserials, books, manuscripts, diaries, reports, and visuals. Women: Transnational Networks focuses on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late-eighteenth century to the era of suffrage in the early-twentieth century, all through a transnational perspective. Source libraries include the Library of Congress, the London School of Economics and Political Science Library, and the Library of the Society of Friends.

Best Bet This database includes tens of thousands of primary documents, document projects with introductory essays that interpret the documents, a definitive bibliography, related web links, a Dictionary of Social Movements, and an enormous collection of images. The collection is not static and additions will be loaded on an ongoing basis.

The database contains 1297 primary sources with 1100 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries--records the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

Women and the Law ("Peggy") is a collection that brings together books, biographies and periodicals dedicated to the role of women in society and the law. This unique collection of materials provides a convenient platform for users to research the progression of women's roles and rights in society over the past 200 years. Also included are more than 70 titles from Emory University Law School's Feminism and Legal Theory Project which provide a platform to view the effect of law and culture on the female gender.

LGBTQ+ Rights charts the gay rights movement in America, showing the civil rights codified into law in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the inequalities that still exist today. Topics covered include the Defense of Marriage Act, the AIDS crisis, military service by gay and transgender service members, "bathroom bills," and more. A separate subcollection presents historical texts whose views some readers may find offensive today, showing the prejudicial beliefs that permeated society and helped formed the laws of their time.

HeinOnline’s Civil Rights database brings together over 3,000 publications covering civil rights in the United States as their legal protections and definitions are expanded to cover more and more Americans. Containing hearings and committee prints, legislative histories on the landmark legislations, CRS and GAO reports, briefs from major Supreme Court cases, and publications from the Commission on Civil Rights, this database allows users to educate themselves on the ways our civil rights have been strengthened and expanded over time, as well as how these legal protections can go further still. A curated list of scholarly articles, a varied collection of books on many civil rights topics, and a list of prominent civil rights organizations help take the research beyond HeinOnline.

The world's largest academic multi-disciplinary database, Academic Search Premier provides full text for nearly 4,700 publications, including full text for more than 3,600 peer-reviewed journals. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.

ProQuest Digital Dissertations-- Provides bibliographic citations, and full-text access for doctoral dissertations and master's thesis completed at over 1,000 accredited colleges and universities worldwide.

An online, full-text archive of complete backfiles of scholarly periodical literature since 1872. Journals are intended to be archival, not current; most are 2-5 years behind the current issues, depending on the journal. Full Text.

This database provides full text, full image of nearly 100 scholarly journals from Johns Hopkins Press and other scholarly publishers. Provides searching of full text
across all journals in the database, selected journal titles, or in just a single title. Allows searching of table of contents of articles and book reviews by author and title
as well as by Library of Congress subject headings. Full Text.

Find articles from two of the largest collections of education research in the world.

Over 4 million indexes, journal articles, chapters in books and entire books on psychology and related fields compiled by the American Psychological Association. Coverage: 1887-present.

Includes indexes and abstracts for articles in sociology and related disciplines in 20,000 journals in 30 different languages. Doctoral dissertations and book reviews are also included. Includes some full text. Coverage is 1963 to the present.

Indexes literature on world history (excluding U.S. and Canada) and the profession of history in 2,100 journals. Coverage is 1982 to the present. Abstracts Only.

A massive index and abstracting service focused on the subject areas of literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. Produced by the Modern Language Association, the index is international in scope, and incorporates both periodicals and books. Coverage is 1963 to the present. Abstracts Only.

This database originated with the acquisition and subsequent merging of two popular databases in the fields of communication and mass media studies -- CommSearch (formerly produced by the National Communication Association (NCA)), and Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Pennsylvania State University). Communication & Mass Media Complete provides an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and educators interested in any and all aspects of communication and mass media.

An Open Access Collection of an Alternative Press - the database is comprised of periodicals produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Research diverse perspectives, topics and trends that align with curricular areas such as Political Science, English, Sociology, Humanities, Business, International Studies and more. Features reliable, credible information from a wide variety of international, national, and local news sources from the 1980s to the present. Updated daily.

This is a new product that substitutes scanned digital images for traditional microfilm and microfiche. NIU currently offers five publications on the new medium--Barron's, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. The papers have a moving wall that extends from 2008 forward. Like traditional microfilm there is a three month or so lag time from initial posting to appearance as scanned image. On the other hand, digital microfilm is much more readily accessible and easier to manipulate than traditional microform images.To initiate a search use the pull down menu at the top of page and select an individual newspaper. From there select a date. The database is highly flexible in that it allows the user to crop, zoom, copy and otherwise adjust the digital image.

HAPI online--Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) comprehends approximately 300,000 journal article citations about Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, and Hispanics/Latinos in the United States.
HAPI currently provides over 100,000 links to the full text of articles appearing in more than 600 key social science and humanities journals published throughout the world.