Welcome to the Politics and International Relations subject guide - your guide to using the library resources, services and facilities for your subject.
A major part of your learning at university is doing your own research for assignments, projects, your dissertation, etc. This means you need to be able to do a comprehensive search for books, journal articles, and other sources relevant to a specific topic that provide a base of knowledge, help you explore a topic and allow you to form your own ideas and opinions on the topic. This is often referred to as literature searching.
On this page we have gathered together a range of online resources that allow you to do this kind of searching and help you do better research.
For more guidance on literature searching see our Literature Searching guide.
Use these databases to search for scholarly literature e.g. journal articles, book chapters & reviews, conference reports and proceedings, etc., for your subject area.
More databases for
Use these key databases to search for and access current full-text newspaper and news sources articles, including both UK and international titles.
Use these databases to locate or view official documents e.g. government publications, parliamentary papers, government documents, transcripts, speeches, etc.
Use these databases to search for and view TV news programmes, documentaries, interviews, films, etc.
As well as searching the Library's physical and local collections i.e. books, e-books, journals, etc., DiscoverEd is also searching a wide range of the e-journals and databases the Library has access to so it's easy to find scholarly literature. DiscoverEd is always a good place to start your searching.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Like DiscoverEd, Google Scholar can be a good place to start your search but it does not allow for advanced or complex searching as in the databases.
Google Scholar may not provide access to full-text, however, by linking to the Library you can access full-text where there is a University subscription.
You will now see FindIt@Edinburgh links next to items in your Google Scholar results that you can use to access the full-text.
This short video below demonstrates how to do this.
The academic field of Politics and International Relations crosses over with a number of other disciplines. Depending on your research area it may be worthwhile looking at the databases available in other subject areas e.g.
See a full list of subjects and their recommended databases at:
