Find Books
UCB: Use OskiCat to find books related to your topic at UC Berkeley. Oskicat will show you where it's located, and will also show you the Library of Congress Subject Heading -- which can help you find material other relevant books.
UC: Not enough books at Berkeley? Use Melvyl to find more books at other campuses in the UC system. Clickon the REQUEST button (in the detailed view of a catalog record) to request the item through Interlibrary Loan.
World: Still want more? You can search thousands of libraries through WorldCat on FirstSearch and then request the material through UC e-links or directly via Interlibrary Loan.
Google Books: Library catalogs don't search inside of books. Google Books can help you identify the book you need, then click on "Find in a Library" to see if we have it.
UC eLinks and Citation Linker
Sometimes the database you search doesn't link to the fulltext -- it only gives the citation. Click the 
button to see if Berkeley has it online, and if not, it will check for a print version. And if we don't have it at all, it lets you request it through Interlibrary Loan.
What if there isn't a button??? Sometimes you find an article in a bibliography, a book or a footnote -- and you want to see if we have it. The Citation Linker searches through our online databases to see if it's available fulltext. If not, it sets up a search for the paper journal in Melvyl. And if we don't have it at Berkeley, it lets you request it through Interlibrary Loan.
This guide has been archived
Please note: this course guide was created during a previous semester, and is no longer being actively maintained. For a list of current course guides, please see http://lib.berkeley.edu/alacarte/course-guides.
Find Articles
We have hundreds of research databases which help you find articles (and more) on a wide variety of topics. They are organized according to academic discipline, by name, or by type of database (newspapers, articles, dissertations, etc.) A few of the core resources for this class are listed below.
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Social Services Abstracts
Indexes journals worldwide related to the fields of social work, human services, and social policy. (Search all CSA/Illumina Social Sciences databases.)
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Social Work Abstracts
Indexes hundreds of journals related to social work on a wide range of topics.
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Sociological Abstracts
Core database in sociology, many overlaps with social welfare.(Search all CSA/Illumina Social Sciences databases.)
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PAIS International
For the public policy aspect of social welfare, this is a useful index. Also indexes government documents. International in focus. (Search all CSA/Illumina Social Sciences databases.)
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Academic Search Complete
An interdisciplinary index to articles in over 10,000 journals, many are available fulltext.
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Family and Society Studies Worldwide
Indexes scholarly journals (and more) related to social science research about the family and society.
Search Tips
- Use synonyms -- there are many ways to express a concept (teenager or teenagers or adolescent)
- Use truncation to get different forms of the word, for example teenage* will retrieve teenagers, teenager, teenaged, etc.
- Use quotation marks when you want an "exact phrase"