Additional Print/Web Indexes and Bibliographies
Bibliographies can be useful--especially for identifying books and archival collections.
- ViVa Women's History DatabaseThis online bibliography is also listed under the Women's History tab. ViVa stands for "Vrouwengeschiedenis in het Vaktijdschrift," which is Dutch for "Women's History in Professional Journals." ViVa is a current bibliography of women's and gender history in historical and women's studies journals. Articles in English, French, German, Dutch, Scandinavian languages, and, occasionally Spanish, are selected from 180 European, American, Canadian, Asian, Australian and New Zealand journals. All bibliographic descriptions are stored in the ViVa database. It now contains more than 12,000 records describing articles from 1975 onwards.
- Women in American History : A BibliographyThis 1979 subset of history indexes of the time provides annotated listings of sources. Probably only worth consulting if you are looking for older materials which are probably only in print or microform format. In other words, a resource for those doing exhaustive research.
- 500 Great Books by Women : A Reader's GuideThis annotated bibliography, located in the circulating collection, is great fun to browse through. Want to get some reading ideas for the summer? This book has lots of suggestions for important books by women writers.
- A Bibliographical Guide to African-American Women WritersListings organized by author. Both primary and secondary materials. No annotations.
- Directory of Open Access Journals: Gender StudiesYou are better off with the full-text articles you can find in our databases. Still, if you'd like to see a listing of articles from "free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals" related to gender studies, give this link a look.
- The Women's Movement in the Seventies : An International English-Language BibliographyOf possible interest to someone researching second wave feminism.
- Black American Feminisms: A Multidisciplinary BibliographyThis website identifies as "an extensive bibliography of black American Feminist thought from across the disciplines. References date back to the nineteenth century when African American women like Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper and Sojourner Truth challenged the conventions and mores of their era to speak publicly against slavery and in support of black women's rights."
- Female Psychology : A Partially Annotated BibliographyAn extensive (but dated) bibliography, sponsored by the New York City Coalition for Women's Mental Health
The Most Valuable Bibliographies of All
Although book bibliographies and online indexes are essential tools in research, your most vital resource, once you have settled on a topic, will be the Bibliographies (AKA References or Works Cited) at the end of the best scholarly articles that you find on your topic. A good scholar makes a thorough literature review a large part of their research process. And that literature review is one of the aspects of an academic article that is examined by peer reviewers and editors.
So when you find one good article on the topic you are interested in, be sure to track as many of the salient resources that you can from that author's bibliography.
As an example, here is the title of one article, plus just the first few references from the multi-page bibliography.
You might find pages and pages of great leads at the end of the article, so explore them! Check the eJournal Locator and the Online Catalog (OPAC) to see if Sawyer Library owns the items of interest. And ask for assistance at the Reference Desk, as needed.
