Search tips:

  • Combine keywords and phrases., e.g. prisons AND Norway *
  • Place quotation marks around phrases, .e.g. "criminal justice" AND comparative
  • Place parentheses around alternate terms connected with OR. (police OR policing) AND comparative

*Note that I didn't write prisons in Norway. Words like "in," "of," "within," "between" are "stopwords" in databases meaning they are not searched. You can search for the entire phrase, "prisons in Norway" (using the quotation marks), but you may end up missing many relevant articles that don't use that exact phrase.

Political Science Database

Note: Not every topic will work well in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. See additional databases, below. In addition, WPSA can be a little tricky to search because it looks for your search terms across the full text of articles. There are a few tricks that will sometimes help.

  • Adjacency.
    Find terms near one another in the text (NEAR/5, NEAR/15, NEAR/30), e.g."native americans" near/30 police
  • loc(country name), e.g. prison and loc(norway)
  • Subject terms that appear with relevant articles. Scroll down the entry and look for these in the right-hand column.

Search examples:

  • prison and loc(norway), but simply Norway and Prison works much better in Criminal Justice Abstracts below.
  • "native americans" near/30 police. (See also: Ethnic News Watch in the News Databases section)
  • "native americans" NEAR/30 (police OR policing)
  • pakistan AND india  NEAR/30 "criminal justice"
  • "private prisons" OR "prison privatization" AND (global OR worldwide OR comparative)
  • narcotics near/30 (police or policing) and loc(Mexico)
  • immigra* and border NEAR/5 policies AND loc(israel)
  • immigra* and border NEAR/5 policies AND loc(united states)

More Subject Databases

Searching in the databases below is a little more straightforward.  Simply enter your keywords (no connecting terms like, in, within, of, between). You do not need to use adjacency operators (NEAR/ _ ) or loc(country name).

Sample search:

"bail reform" AND "new jersey" AND "new york"

"rules of evidence" AND comparative AND (country name). Once the results appear, use the Section Type filter on the left to choose articles. Scroll down to apply the filter.