LibGuides: MC 202: The Law, Ethics, Crime, and the Global Society: Secondary Sources

What are secondary sources?

Secondary sources are materials which provide an interpretation, analysis or discussion of information originally presented elsewhere. This is in contrast to primary materials which provide first-hand evidence. What counts as a secondary source depends heavily on the topic you are writing about and the discipline you are working within.

Scholarly articles are a common type of secondary source:

These are written by experts and scholars, and reviewed by other scholars in the same field (peer review)
They are published in journals which usually are focused on one topic (example: American Studies is a journal focused on American culture)
They provide in-depth analysis on a specific topic (often quite narrow!)
They can be used to help you build an argument in a research paper

Subject Specific Databases

By Subject

Political Science Complete This link opens in a new window
Includes full-text and citations.
Social Sciences Full Text This link opens in a new window
Includes social sciences academic journals, includes full-text and citations.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Good collection of African Studies journals, as well as a variety of other disciplines. Years available vary with each title, but the most recent issues available in JSTOR will be 4-5 years old.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Contains access to more than 240 journals, mostly scholarly. Coverage includes some African Studies and Political Science titles.
PAIS International This link opens in a new window
Covers topical public and social issues and the making and evaluating of public policy.
Gale OneFile: LegalTrac This link opens in a new window
Use this database to research: Case Studies, Government Regulations, Practice of Law, Statutes, Taxation and International Law. Access all major law reviews, and specialty law and bar association journals.
Gender Studies Database This link opens in a new window
Covers the full spectrum of gender-engaged scholarship in & out of academia. Includes full-text and citations.
Humanities Source This link opens in a new window
Covering literary, scholarly and creative thought. It provides full text, indexing and abstracts for the most noted scholarly sources in the humanities.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to the 1920s and contains millions of citations from journals and series, as well as book publishers.

By Region

Africa-Wide Information This link opens in a new window
Provides access to multi-disciplinary information on Africa, Europe, and the USA. Databases included are African Studies Abstracts, Business & Industry-Africa, Bibliography on Contemporary African Politics & Developments, plus others.
Index Islamicus This link opens in a new window
International bibliography of publications in European languages covering all aspects of Islam and the Muslim world, including history, beliefs, societies, cultures, languages, and literature.
Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) This link opens in a new window
The online Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS), contains entries covering western-language monographs, articles and book chapters on all parts of Asia published since 1971.
HAPI Online This link opens in a new window
The Web version of the Hispanic American Periodicals Index, HAPI Online indexes more than 500 social science and humanities journals with information about Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, the U.S.-Mexico border region, and Hispanics in the United States. Coverage from 1970 to the present.

Other Databases at the Library

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MSU Libraries

Course Guides

MC 202: The Law, Ethics, Crime, and the Global Society

What are secondary sources?

Subject Specific Databases

By Subject

By Region

Other Databases at the Library