Sociological Abstracts: Demonstration on How to Search

Sociological Abstracts: This database indexes the international literature of Sociology and covers topics such as culture, family, social psychology, aging, anthropology, demography, methodology, social structure, ethnic studies, urban studies, violence, and more. It offers citations to journal articles, book reviews, books, chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.  It covers the years 1963 to current date.

To get to the database:  Start at the Library Home page, click on Databases A-Z, and scroll down.

Sociological Abstracts

1. This is a database of articles from journal articles, book reviews, books, chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.   2. Can be searched by subject.   3. Contains a some full text (online) articles and links to much more through SFX   4. Coverage from 1963 to present   5. Covers topics such as culture, family, social psychology, aging, anthropology, demography, methodology, social structure, ethnic studies, urban studies, violence, and more    Database Guide

1. This is the opening search screen for Sociological Abstracts.  Notice the three box format. Notice also that you may enter up to three forms of the term you are interested in searching,   You are likely to limit your search to English as this library owns few foreign language scholarly journals.

2. I found 34 articles on my topic, here are the first 3 articles.  To see more information about this article, I will need to click
 on the blue title of the articles.  Notice that to the right is the subjects for these articles.  I could re-do my search with these terms.
The first record is for Dissertation Abstracts International.  This library does not own the Dissertations.

3. An example of an record within Sociological Abstract. Notice that we have the title of the article, the authors, the source (the journal), descriptors
 and an abstract (a paragraph that describes the article.) To locate the actual articles, click on SFX along the top.

4. SFX will look up and see if we own the article.  We do own it through Springer/Kluwer Academic Journals Standard.  Click on Go to get the
online version.  We also won the article in print.  It is on the second floor of the North Library Building.

5. Each full text provider will have different opening screens.  You are looking for the words Full-text or PDF. 
In this case, see it along the bottom of the screen

6. Sociological Abstracts is published by a company called CSA. 
    The Pollak Library subscribes to a number of databases that  are published by this company:
    Criminal Justice Abstracts
    Education : A Sage Full-text Collection
    Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
    National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts
    Philosophers Index
   

Prepared by Cynthia Bruns,  CBruns@fullerton.edu An administrative page of the Paulina June & George Pollak Library at California State University, Fullerton. (c) 2005 California State University, Fullerton. All rights reserved. Date this site was last updated:  02/09/09