Sources selected for this guide have been chosen for graduate students in the OCL program. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the program it may be helpful to consult other guides in addition to this one. You may also consider setting up a phone or skype appointment with the librarian for more in depth assistance on research projects. Contact information is on the right.
This is the most comprehensive ABI/INFORM database, comprised of ABI/INFORM Global, ABI/INFORM Trade and Industry, ABI/INFORM Dateline and ABI/INFORM Archive, featuring thousands of full-text journals, dissertations, working papers, key business and economics periodicals such as the Economist, country- and industry-focused reports, and downloadable data. Its international coverage gives researchers a complete picture of companies and business trends around the world.
ABI stands for Abstracted Business Information. There was a database building project going on at the University of Wisconsin named Inform and the creators of ABI obtained the Inform software, materials, and customer list. Therefore, the name became ABI/INFORM.
ProQuest Central combines the complete content of over thirty of the most heavily used ProQuest databases across all major subject areas, with deep coverage in business, health and medical, news, social sciences, arts and humanities, and science and technology. It provides access to scholarly journals, high value market research, country, economic, and industry reports, pre-print working papers, full-text dissertations, and a vast number of newspapers, professional journals, and general interest periodicals.
ProQuest Central currently includes all the content available in these ProQuest Databases:
Indexes scholarly literature in the natural and social sciences. Use this to get extensive inter-disciplinary access to journal articles and also to find out which articles are being cited by other scholars . Cited references from 1970-present, records from 1788-present.
NOTE: WMU users do not have access to SciVal through Scopus
This collection includes all 2,800+ academic journals on JSTOR, covering more than 60 disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Also included are millions of primary sources from the 19th Century British Pamphlets, World Heritage Sites: Africa, Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa, and the Global Plants collections.
The JSTOR platform does not provide access to the most recent 3-5 years of a journal’s content. Current issues of journals hosted on the JSTOR platform are available through separate subscriptions on other platforms. Please check LibrarySearch for access to embargoed content.
Covers world-wide literature in psychology and related disciplines. Journal articles, technical reports, books, book chapters, and dissertations are included. Coverage from 1806 to Current. Updated weekly.
This is the core index in the field of Education. Includes citations with abstracts for over 2,000 journals and more than 450,000 reports in education and related fields.Covers 1966-present. This database is also available from the US government.
This service from Google searches scholarly literature, including articles, theses, books and technical reports, and "gray literature" from many areas of research. Some materials are free, some will be available to WMU users by clicking on "Article Linker" while others may require a fee. Use this source in addition to library databases for a more complete search of scholarly literature.
To enable links from the "Find it@WMU" from off-campus computers, follow these instructions or watch a video tutorial :
1. Go to Google Scholar.
2. Click on the "options" wheel in the top right corner.
3. Select "Library Links" from menu on the left side.
4. In the "Library Links" search box, type "Western Michigan University Libraries".
5. Click the checkbox next to "Western Michigan University Libraries (ArticleLinker)".
6. Click the "Save".
8. A link to "ArticleLinker" should now appear next to those citations that are available electronically from the Libraries.
The databases listed in the box to the right include many, but not all, articles in full text. For information on how to get the full text of an article when it is not immediately available in the database you are in see the tab in this guide labelled "Delivery of Books and Articles."