ANTHRO R5B: China and the American World

This course guide was created during a previous semester, and is no longer being actively maintained. Here is a list of current course guides.

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The library website is your gateway to research at UC Berkeley.

• Anthropology Library
• East Asian Library
• Library hours and maps 
• Types of resources 
• Over ten million volumes 
• Several dozen libraries

Photo of card catalog from OSU Archives on Flickr.

Photo of card catalog index card by dfulmer on Flickr.

Use OskiCat to locate materials on the shelves of the UC Berkeley libraries and also to:

• renew books online
• find course reserves and to
• place holds on items that are checked out.

Use Melvyl to locate materials at other campuses in the UC system, or worldwide, and also to

• request materials from another library if we don't own it
• find articles from some article databases
• easily format a citation for copying into a bibliography
Melvyl will also show you the location and availablity of items that we own.

The following databases are recommended for finding scholarly journal articles related to anthropological topics in contemporary China and includes general academic article databases for interdisciplinary research.

• Academic Search Complete
  A multidisciplinary index to articles in more than 10,900 journals and other publications in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese; full-text is available for over 5300 journals.
  
• JSTOR
  Includes over 1000 scholarly journals with access to more than 2 million articles. JSTOR is an archive which means that current issues (generally the most recent 3-5 years) of the journals are not yet available.
  
• Anthropology Plus
  Indexes journal articles, essays, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology as well as ethnology, archaeology, folklore, and material culture. This database combines the resources of Anthropological Index and Anthropological Literature.
  
• AnthroSource
  An electronic portal to the 32 journals of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Archeological Publications of the American Anthropological Association, Cultural Anthropology, Ethos, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and more. Please note: users' access to this resource will be blocked after extended login periods. To avoid blocked access, logout periodically and then log back in.
  
• International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)
  Indexes over 3000 journals, books, chapters, and book reviews in the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology from more than 100 countries. More than 70 languages are represented, with 30% percent of records published in languages other than English.
  
• Sociological Abstracts
  Indexes over 1,900 journals, books, dissertations, and reviews in the social sciences on sociological topics as well as selected anthropology, criminology, demography, law, social psychology, and urban development.
  

• LexisNexis Academic
  Includes over 6,000 individual titles of international, national and local newspapers and wire services; radio and television transcripts; and business, medical, industry, and legislative magazines, journals, and newsletters. Wide geographic coverage and translations from foreign-language sources, as well as news services like the Associated Press, Agence France Press, El Pais and Xinhua (New China) News Agency.
  
• ProQuest Newspapers
  Includes New York Times (Historical with Index, 1851-2008, 1980-current). Los Angeles Times (Historical, 1881-1988, 1985-current). Wall Street Journal (Historical, 1889-1994, 1984-current).
  
• Alt-Press Watch
  Alternative, radical, and independent magazines, newspapers, and journals in North America which report on politics and government, policy and culture, international issues, education, environment as well as reviews of theater, movies and books.
  
• Alternative Press Index
  Includes more than 450 alternative, radical, and left magazines, newsletters, and journals in North America which report and analyze issues of cultural, economic, political, and social change. Approximately 90% of publications included are not indexed elsewhere. Indexes editorials, regular columns, essays, fiction; speeches, interviews, statistics, reprints; bibliographies, biographies, obituaries, memoirs; and reviews. Interfaces available for French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. Alternative Press Index Archive provides coverage of materials from 1969 to 1990.
  
• Business and Industry Database
  Covers almost 1000 major U.S. and international trade journals, general business publications, and national & regional newspapers and newsletters.
  

Once you've used an article database to find articles on your topic, you may need to use this button: in order to locate and read the full text of the article. 

UC-eLinks will link you to the online full text of an article if UCB has paid for online access; otherwise, UC-eLinks will help you locate a print copy on the shelf in the library. If UCB doesn't own the article in print or online format, UC-eLinks can also help you order a copy from another library.

For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 4 min.)

You can also set up UC-eLinks to work with Google Scholar.  For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 2 min.)

To use library databases from off campus you have to set up the proxy server: this changes your browser settings.

• Different browsers [Firefox, Chrome, Safari...] have different instructions- they are all here.
• You can set it up on multiple devices
• You log in with your CalNet ID
• There's an alternative: the VPN

Have a citation? Use Citation Linker to go directly to the article.

Need to find a specific journal? Use E-Journal Titles A-Z to find it online or search Oskicat by the journal title (e.g., Journal of Roman Archaeology) to see if it's on the library shelves.

What's it look like?

Critically Analyzing Information Sources (Cornell)

Doing good research requires different skills than searching. Searching online encourages ways of thinking that can create false expectations and poor research results. Here are a few tips:

• Slow down.
• Look at the advanced search page
• Iterative searching
  • Learn from the search results
  • Too many results? Too few?
  • Look at citations from good sources
• Try
  • Various keywords
  • Various subjects
  • Multiple databases (information silos!)

Searching for scholarly sources

• choose the right database
• limit results to "peer-reviewed" sources

• Citing Your Sources - a brief online guide to the main citation styles and a brief discussion on what constitutes plagiarism. 
• Cite Right: A Quick Guide to Citation Styles--MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, Professions, and More (UCB-only access) Charles Lipson. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006. 
  Many print editions throughout the libraries.
• MLA handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th edition. New York : Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
  Doe Reference Reference Hall LB2369 .G53 2009
  Main Gardner Stacks LB2369 .G53 2009
  Many older editions available throughout the UCB libraries.
  

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