Appendix I: Identifying the Scholarly Literature (UCLA Version)
Supplement to Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, Princeton University Press, 2006
Last revised: April 16, 2009
In Chapter Three of the book, I talked in a general way about how to get a sense for what a particular area of scholarship is like. In this appendix, I’ll discuss some specific sources of bibliographical information and I’ll talk a bit about how some of them can be used. This version of the appendix is for people connected with UCLA. The call numbers are for books in the UCLA library, and one or two of the links work only from UCLA computers. A non-UCLA version is also available. Since websites die and are redesigned all the time, and since URLs are also always changing, this appendix will be updated about once a year.
Contents of this page:
Bibliographies, Guides and Related Works
Political Science Literature Reviews
Web of Science (Social Science Citation Index),
There is no bibliography—not that I could find, at any rate—that covers the history of international relations as a whole. One general work, however, is still worth looking at, even though it’s by now a little out-of-date:
Byron Dexter, ed., The Foreign Affairs 50-year Bibliography: New Evaluations of Significant Books on International Relations 1920-1970 (New York, R.R. Bowker for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1972). This has relatively lengthy reviews of what at the time of publication were the most important works in this area.
Ref and Powell: Z6461 .F762
For a more comprehensive listing of works, mainly in German, English and French, dealing primarily with international and German politics in the twentieth century, check out the very important bibliography put out as a supplement to the most important German journal in this area, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte:
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Bibliographie zur Zeitgeschichte. This running bibliography was originally published over a two-year cycle but now comes out annually.
Z6205 .B47
A cumulative version, including the material that had been listed between 1953 and 1980, was published under the same title (Munich and New York: K.G. Saur, 1982-83).
* Z6204 .B59 1982
For recent listings in the Bibliographie zur Zeitgeschichte, you can also use the Institut für Zeitgeschichte’s online catalog. In the first search field, select “Bibliog.z.Zeitgesch.” from the drop-down menu. In the next field put in the reference information and year for the subject you’re interested in; you can see what to put in by looking at their short online guide. This is organized the same way the Bibliographie is. For example, if you’d like to see their listings of material on the Berlin question published in 2007, put in “12dj07”—for category 12 (“Deutsche Geschichte seit 1945”), subcategory d (“Berlin-Problem”), j (for “jahr”), and 07 (2007)—and then click the red search button (“Suchen”).
Or you might want to do a much fuller search in the IfZ’s online catalog by selecting “IfZ-Systematik” from the drop-down menu and then searching for a particular call number, corresponding to a particular category. You can identify the call numbers you want to search for by consulting the IfZ organizational guide; clicking into the general call numbers for broad categories will take you into more specific guides, giving call numbers for particular subjects. You really don’t need much German to use the catalog in this way. Suppose, for example, you’re interested in Franco-German relations in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In the organizational guide, under the general heading “Internationale Beziehungen” (“International Relations”), there’s a heading “Internationale Beziehungen seit 1945” (“International Relations since 1945”), and a subheading there for “Deutsche Außenpolitik seit 1945” (“German foreign policy since 1945”). When you click into the link for the call numbers corresponding to that subheading (x 401-499), you’ll see, in the more detailed listing that turns up, a heading for “Deutsch-französischer Vertrag 1963, Deutsch-französische Zusammenarbeit 1963-” (“Franco-German treaty of 1963, Franco-German cooperation, 1963-”), giving the call number “x 495.” That’s the call number you then do an “IfZ-Systematik” search for in the online guide. That search will yield something like 139 hits, including journal articles and chapters in books. You can, of course, also search by author or title word; the listings for the titles that turn up that way yield IfZ-Systematik call numbers that you can then search for. You can do the standard things with this search engine—for example, limit the search in various ways and save items of interest (by clicking “in Merkliste”) on your list of hits; the “Merkliste” can then be printed out or saved.
A very good introduction to the new historical literature (with particular emphasis on Britain) are the articles dealing with the twentieth century in the (British) Historical Association’s Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, a “selective and critical analysis of new historical books, journals and journal articles.” The coverage is fairly general, but the most important works dealing with international politics are certainly noted here.
If you’re interested in finding out about relatively minor conflicts, at least in the post-1945 period, you might want to look at the
James Ciment, ed., Encyclopedia of Conflicts Since World War II (Armonk: Sharpe Reference, 1999) Ref D843 .E46 1999
This has relatively brief articles on many conflicts; each article has a brief list of other works bearing on those conflicts.
Most bibliographical or historiographical works deal with either the foreign policy of a single country or with specific topics. By far the largest number of such works relate to American foreign policy:
Michael Hogan, ed., Paths to Power: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations to 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The historiographical articles included in this collection were also originally published in Diplomatic History. E183.7 P29 2000
Gerald Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport: Greenwood, 1981) E183.7 A56
Gordon Martel, ed., American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890-1993 (New York: Routledge, 1994). E744 .A5327 1994
Robert Schulzinger, ed., A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2003)
Warren I. Cohen, ed., Pacific Passage: The Study of American-East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-first century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) DS518.8 .P336 1996.
Some very useful sources are available online. See, for example:
Richard Immerman’s Bibliography on U.S. Diplomatic History, 1918-1975
“Contemporary China: A Book List” (Lynn White and Valerie Cropper). 77 pages, with sections on Sino-American relations, China’s policies toward Russia and Japan, collections of documents, and so on.
Bibliography on the History of Europe during the East-West Conflict (very well-organized, German-language list)
Korean War
bibliography (supplements Keith D.
McFarland's The Korean War: An Annotated Bibliography (New York:
Garland, 1986)
Books page from Nick Sarantakes’s U.S. Diplomatic History Resources Index. The Sarantakes website is a very valuable resource for people in our field. In one part of the website, in fact, Sarantakes lists a whole series of bibliographies available online dealing with specific topics relating to international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. This I think is one of the handful of lists you will certainly want to look at as you begin a new project in this area.
The Digital Library of the Zurich-based International Relations and Security Network (ISN) is another very useful website. You can search it by subject or by region. The Digital Library is broken down into a number of sections (publications, primary sources, etc.) which can also be searched by subject or by region. Particular subjects and regions are broken down into sub-categories (e.g., when you click into the link for “arms control,” you can then click on the link for “arms control history”), and there’s also a search engine that will allow you to do keyword searches within those subject or region listings.
Finally, if you are interested in one of the many topics covered by the Digital National Security Archive (described in Appendix II), click the link for “bibliography” on the homepage, then check the title of the collection you’re interested in. The bibliography linked to the Kissinger Transcripts collection, for example, includes 60 titles.
There are also a couple of encyclopedias you might find useful:
Bruce W. Jentleson and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Ref E183.7 .E53 1997
Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns, and Fredrik Logevall, editors in chief, and Louise B. Ketz, executive editor, Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (New York: Scribner, 2002). Ref E183.7 .E52 2002
The first of these, prepared under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, has relatively brief articles on a wide range of topics. The second has longer articles on a number of subjects related to international politics, not just U.S. policy. In each case, the articles include a handful of bibliographical references.
Don’t forget that if your library uses the Library of Congress cataloguing system (as most research libraries nowadays do) you can find books dealing with U.S. relations with a particular country by going directly to the E183.8 section of the stacks. The part of the call number that follows the “E183.8” will begin with the same letter that that country’s name begins with. Books, for example, dealing with U.S. relations with China will begin with “E183.8 C6,” and those dealing with U.S.-Canadian relations will start with “E183.8 C2” and so on.
To find bibliographies dealing with the foreign relations of countries other than the United States, you could take one of the bibliographies I just listed—the Beisner book, for example—and then look it up in your library catalogue. You could see which subject headings it is listed under and then do a subject search, substituting for “United States” in the subject heading the name of that particular country. The following are typical of the sorts of listings that can be found with this method:
Sadao Asada, ed., Japan and the World, 1853-1952: A Bibliographic Guide to Japanese Scholarship in Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). DS881.96 .J37 1989
Thomas Hammond, Soviet Foreign Relations and World Communism: A Selected Annotated Bibliography of 7,000 books in 30 languages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Z2517.R4 H18
William E. Echard, Foreign Policy of the French Second Empire: A Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). Z6465.F7 E26 1988
Andrew R. Carlson, German Foreign Policy, 1890-1914, and Colonial Policy to 1914: A Handbook and Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1970). Z2247.R4 C19
Abraham J. Edelheit and Hershel Edelheit, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union: A Selected Bibliography of Sources in English (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992). Z2510.3 .R57 1992
Donna Evleth, France under the German Occupation, 1940-1944: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). Z6207.W8 E84 1991
There is also an important series of guides—the “Guides to European Diplomatic History Research and Research Materials”—covering the interwar period, or more precisely the period from 1918 to 1945. These works discuss both primary and secondary sources, and although some of them are getting a little out-of-date, practically all of them are still worth looking at:
Robert H. Johnston, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1991)
Sidney Aster, British Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1984)
George W. Baer, International Organizations, 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1981).
Alan Cassels, Italian Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources,1981).
Christoph M. Kimmich, German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1981).
Robert J. Young, French Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1981).
There are also a number of useful guides dealing with particular subjects. These can often be found by doing a title search for a particular phrase (like “Cold War”) and, simultaneously, for a word like “guide,” “bibliography” or “survey.” Or they can be found by tacking on the word “bibliography” to a specific subject heading and then doing a subject search, perhaps adding it as a separate search term. Here are some examples of bibliographies that turn up in this way:
Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, c1998). Contains a 104-page annotated bibliography (pp. 207-310)
J.L. Black, Origins, Evolution, and Nature of the Cold War: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1986) Z6465.U5 B53 1986
Sino-Soviet Conflict: A Historical Bibliography (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, c1985) Z6465.C6 S56 1985
Ronald M. DeVore, The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Historical, Political, Social & Military Bibliography (Santa Barbara: Clio, 1976) Z3479.R4 D49
Sanford Silverburg, Middle East Bibliography (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1992) Z3013 S54 1992
The United States in East Asia: A Historical Bibliography (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1985). Z3001 .U65 1985
James S. Olson, ed. The Vietnam War: Handbook of the Literature and Research (Westport: Greenwood, 1993). Ref DS558 .V58 1993
David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) DS557.5 .A54 2002
Lester H. Brune and Richard Dean Burns, America and the Indochina Wars, 1945-1990: A Bibliographical Guide (Claremont: Regina, 1991) Ref Z3226 .B89 1992
If you’re interested in the Vietnam War, there’s a very good bibliography available online:
Edwin E. Moïse’s Vietnam War Bibliography
And if you’re interested in the Cold War, you might want to look at the list available on the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact's website:
Parallel History Project, Selective Bibliography on the Cold War Alliances
There’s
also a series of guides that you might find useful for some purposes: the International
Relations Information Guide series put out by Gale in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. These guides dealt with
particular areas of the world and with some specific questions. Here are some of the titles:
John J. Finan and John Child, Latin America, International Relations: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale, 1981)
Richard J. Kozicki, International Relations of South Asia, 1947-80: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale, 1981).
J. Bryan Collester, The European Communities: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale, 1979).
Mark R. Amstutz, Economics and Foreign Policy: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale, 1977).
Alexine L. Atherton, International Organizations: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale, 1976).
Even though these books are a bit out-of-date by now, you might be able to use them to find more recent works of this sort in these areas. Just look them up in your library’s catalogue, then click into the links for the subject headings they’re listed under. For example, in the MELVYL catalogue, the union catalogue for the University of California system, the Finan and Child book is listed under the subject heading “Latin America -- Foreign relations – Bibliography,” and one of the other books listed under that heading is more recent:
G. Pope Atkins, Handbook of Research on the International Relations of Latin America and the Caribbean (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001).
There are two general areas that have their own literature—military affairs and intelligence—and various guides can help you find your way around those literatures. For works on U.S. military history, you can check out the following works:
Daniel K. Blewett , American Military History: A Guide to Reference and Information Sources (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1995).
Susan Kinnell, Military History of the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1986).
Jack C. Lane, America's Military Past: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale, 1980).
There’s also a very good list of important works in this area available online:
Eliot Cohen’s Strategic Studies Core Readings (2004)
You might also want to take a look at the list of military history bibliographies on the Institut de Stratégie Comparée website.
Note also the more than twenty bibliographies that have come out as part of Garland Publishing’s Wars of the United States series, a collection covering the historical literature dealing with many of America’s wars. See, for example:
Benjamin Beede, Intervention and Counterinsurgency: An Annotated Bibliography of the Small Wars of the United States, 1898-1984 (New York: Garland, 1985) Ref Z1249.M5 B43 1985
Dwight L. Smith, The War of 1812: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1985). Z1240 .S65 1985
Anne Cipriano Venzon, The Spanish-American War: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1990). Z1243 .V45 1990
David R. Woodward and Robert F. Maddox, America and World War I: A Selected Annotated Bibliography of English-language Sources (New York: Garland, 1985).
D769.E8 W67 1985
John J. Sbrega, The War against Japan, 1941-1945: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1989). Z6207.W8 S29 1989
Keith D. McFarland, The Korean War, an Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986). Z3319.K6 M38 1986
Louis A. Peake, The United States in the Vietnam War, 1954-1975: A Selected Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986). Z3226 .P43 1986
On intelligence matters, you might want to take a look at some of the following references:
The U.S. Intelligence Community: Information Resources (Columbia University Library; lists important works plus bibliographies dealing with the subject)
Mark M. Lowenthal, The U.S. Intelligence Community: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994)
Neal H. Petersen, American Intelligence, 1775-1990: A Bibliographical Guide
(Claremont: Regina Books, 1992). Ref Z6724.I7 P48 1992
Literature of Intelligence: A Bibliography of Materials, with Essays, Reviews, and Comments (J. Ransom Clark)
Scholars’ Guide to Intelligence Literature: A Bibliography of the Russell J. Bowen Collection in the Joseph Mark Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, ed. Marjorie W. Cline et al. (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America for the National Intelligence Study Center, 1983) Z6724.I7 S6
Diplomacy, International Affairs, & Intelligence (Georgetown University collections; the section on intelligence is toward the bottom of the page).
International Intelligence History Association
Loyola Homepage on Strategic Intelligence
Bibliography of the John E. Taylor collection (books about espionage and intelligence)
If you’re interested in this subject, be sure to check out the material on the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence website. If you click into the link for “publications” you'll get some very good material, including some original documents. Much of this material is available on pdf and can be easily downloaded and printed out. You can also ask to be put on the mailing list for the CSI's Bulletin, which has a lot of interesting information. Just call the CSI at (703) 613-1751.
Finally, if you would like to learn about the political science
literature in the whole international relations area, there are a number of
guides you should know about. One
important source is:
Ira Katznelson and Helen
Milner, eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (New York:
Norton for the American Political Science Association, 2002).
This volume has five
articles dealing with the international relations literature, some of which refer
to the reader to other review articles.
The APSA has actually published a series of volumes on The State of
the Discipline, all of which contain review articles. Note also:
Ted Robert Gurr, ed., Handbook
of Political Conflict: Theory and
Research (New York: Free Press, 1980)
Manus Midlarsky, ed., Handbook
of War Studies (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
Philip Tetlock, Jo Husbands,
Robert Jervis, Paul Stern, and Charles Tilly, eds., Behavior, Society, and
Nuclear War and Behavior, Society, and International Conflict, 3
vols. (New York: Oxford University Press for the National
Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, 1989-1993)
The Annual Review of
Political Science (available online through the UCLA library) contains
many survey articles covering the international relations literature—for
example, James Fearon’s article on “Domestic
Politics, Foreign Policy, and Theories of International Relations,” which
appeared in the Annual Review in 1998.
There are in addition many
volumes in which leading practitioners present their views about various subfields—about
what’s been accomplished lately, about problems they see with the work that’s
currently being done, and about where the field is going. The articles in those volumes often cite what
are considered the more important works in that particular area. For some
recent examples of this genre, see Michael Brecher and Frank Harvey, eds., Millenial
Reflections on International Studies (2002) [JZ1305 M55 2002]; A.J.R. Groom
and Margot Light, eds., Contemporary International Relations: A Guide to
Theory (1994) [JX1391 C662 1994]; Edward Mansfield and Richard Sisson,
eds., The Evolution of Political Knowledge (2004); and Ken Booth and
Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theory Today (1995). Susan Strange’s article in that latter volume
on “Political Economy and International Relations,” is a particularly good case
in point. This is exactly the sort of
article you would want to read if you were new to the field and wanted to
develop a certain sense for what work in International Political Economy [IPE]
was like. There are also a number of
books in which a single author surveys the whole field of international
relations; chapters in such books often deal with particular subfields. For a very good recent book of this sort, see
Chris Brown, Understanding International Relations, second edition
(2001). At the end of each chapter are
suggestions for further reading. Scholarly journals sometimes have special
issues devoted to this sort of stock-taking:
see, for example, “International Organization at Fifty: Exploration and
Contestation in the Study of World Politics,” International Organization,
52:4 (Autumn 1998).
Collections of readings
(published mainly for undergraduates) can also provide useful entrees in
particular fields of scholarship. Note, for
example, John Baylis and James Wirtz, eds., Strategy in the Contemporary
World: An Introduction to Strategic Studies (2002). The articles here (on topics like terrorism)
will help you get started if you know nothing about the subject; they all have
short lists of works on the subject they cover.
A few collections of readings dealing with IPE are listed at the start
of the Higgott article on “International Political Economy” in the Groom and
Light book I just cited; in that passage, a few major texts dealing with the
subject are also listed. Chris Brown, in the book I just cited, also lists a
number of collections of this sort in his end-of-chapter suggestions for
further reading. For a somewhat older compilation of the many edited volumes in
this area (in which the readings each volume contains are also listed), see
Dorothy LaBarr and J. David Singer, The Study of International Politics: A
Guide to the Sources for the Student, Teacher, and Researcher (1976), pp. 28-78 [Z6461 L113s].
Finally, for lists of
articles by particular international relations theorists click here. About fifty such writers are included there.
Those lists contain links only to “full texts of articles which may be accessed
online, free of charge.”
Let me begin here by listing some important journals you might want to examine when you’re starting a research project in this field. This list includes both history and political science journals. This list is of course very short. Most of the important journals are available electronically—I’ll give you the links for those I’m listing here—and more extensive lists of journals in this area accessible in this way (generally through subscribing libraries) are available online. See, for example, the University of Pennsylvania Library’s list of online journals in international relations and the University of Chicago Library’s lists of online journals in history and political science. Note, finally, h-diplo’s Journal Watch, quarterly listings (by journal title) of “articles of particular interest to scholars of diplomacy, foreign relations, and international history.”
Diplomacy and Statecraft
Diplomatic History. Regularly carries survey-of-the-literature review articles.
Foreign Affairs. Basically a policy journal but with a regular section on “recent books on international relations.” The “books and reviews” section of this journal’s website has links to lists of both capsule and longer book reviews; the lists that turn up can be limited by date, region, and topic.
Historical Journal. Very broad coverage, but has quite a few review articles relate to international politics.
Cambridge University Press website: 1958 -
Intelligence and National Security
International Affairs (London)
International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence
International Organization
Cambridge University Press: 1947 to present
International Security
International
Security webpage (for current issue)
International Studies Quarterly
Blackwell (1997 to present)
Journal of American-East
Asian Relations
Journal of Cold War
Studies
Journal of Contemporary
History
Journal of Military
History (formerly Military
Affairs). Has a section on “recent
journal articles.”
Journal of Strategic
Studies
Relations internationales
Security Studies
Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte
1953-2005; 2006- (no link from
MELVYL, but you can get all issues from the journal directly; no subscription
required; slow download)
World Politics
There are, of course, many other journals that carry articles of interest to people working on international affairs. Not only are there general journals (like the American Political Science Review) that publish articles on international politics, but there is a large periodical literature devoted to all kinds of specialized questions even in this area. One guide to intelligence periodicals, for example, describes about 150 intelligence and intelligence-related journals:
Hayden B. Peake, The Reader's Guide to Intelligence Periodicals (Washington: NIBC Press, 1992).
But when you’re trying to find your way around a field, you can’t read everything, and it’s best to start with the handful of periodicals most likely to give you what you need.
You can also use various search engines to find out about which journal articles that have been published on a particular subject—and indeed which articles are particularly important. I’ll talk here about three in particular: the Social Science Citation Index (part of the Web of Science); the Expanded Academic ASAP; and JSTOR. These are subscription services, but you can generally get access to those search engines through your university library’s website. You can also use publicly available search engines like Google to do work of this sort. But I’ll talk about that not here but in Chapter Six of the book.
Web of Science (including the Social Sciences Citation Index [SSCI]): This search engine is a lot of fun to use once you get the hang of it. It allows you, first, to identify articles relating to topics you’re interested in, and then, using those articles as a kind of base, it allows you to “spread out” and identify related works. You “spread out” by going both up and down. First, once you identify a particular article, you can see quickly which works that article cites in its footnotes. But you can also go the other way and see which articles in the SSCI database cite the particular article you’ve started out with. You can then do the same thing with the new articles you’ve identified, again spreading out in both directions. In that way you can generate a “web of citations,” and in the course of doing so, you develop a certain feel for that particular area of scholarship. You see which articles and authors are cited a lot, which journals are important, and so on.
How do you use the SSCI? The link I just gave you takes you into the basic search page. The first thing you should do is choose which database (or databases) you want to search in by checking (or really unchecking) one or more of them on the bottom of the page. Since no one can quite decide whether history is a social science or one of the humanities, if you’re searching for a topic that has a certain historical dimension, you should probably check the boxes for “Social Sciences Citation Index” and “Arts and Humanities Citation Index,” but leave “Science Citation Index Expanded” unchecked.
You can then search, for example, for works by a particular author (in which case you normally give the last name, followed by first initial and an asterisk). Just choose “author” from the drop-down menu. Or you can do a title or a topic search; a topic search is somewhat broader. To search for a phrase, put it in quotation marks. Then click the “search” button. A results page turns up; you’re allowed there to refine the results in various ways. The listings you end up with can be sorted in various ways—for example, by number of times cited. You can save whatever listings interest you to a marked list, and you can click into the title of each of those listings to see the full record for each article (or book review). To see what other articles have cited it, click the link next to “Times Cited”; the listings that turn up can themselves be saved to your marked list. By clicking the link next to “References” in the full record for an article, you can see what sources were cited in that article, and then, by clicking “Find Related Records,” you can generate a list of other articles in the database that have cited at least one of the same sources. Those listings can of course also be saved to your marked list. The orange icon for “UC e-Links” on the results pages and elsewhere will enable you to locate a copy of that article in the library, or call it up on your computer screen, very quickly.
I should note that when you click into the link next to “Times Cited,” you’ll get a list of just some of the places where the article in question has been cited. If you’d like to see a more complete list, or if you just have a particular article that you’re interested in, you can click into the “Cited Reference Search” link near the top of the search page (or of the results page) and then searching for that particular article. On the page that turns up when you do this search, click the boxes that correspond to the article you’re interested in (or click “Select All”), then click the “Finish Search” box. This generates another results page, which you can work with in the usual way.
Those are the basics, but there’s a lot more you can do with this search engine. When you do a topic or title search, for example, you could use Boolean operators and wildcards like the asterisk (to catch word variants—i.e., “China” as well as “Chinese”) to increase the number of hits. Suppose you’re interested in the Sino-Soviet conflict. You could search directly for “Sino-Soviet conflict.” But you know that that variant terms (like “dispute”) might be used, that some titles might refer to “China” and others to “Chinese,” that key terms might be separated from each other, and so on. So knowing all these things, and not wanting to do a whole series of searches with heavily overlapping results, you could construct a single term: (sino-soviet OR ((Soviet OR Russia* OR USSR) SAME Chin*)) SAME (relations OR dispute OR conflict OR schism). You’d get a much larger number of hits. Many of them might be irrelevant for your purposes, but you can generally tell from the titles which articles you’d want to check out.
You can also identify articles dealing with a particular topic by using Google Scholar. Just enter a term in the search field (e.g., “relative gains”) and run the search. A number of articles are listed, along with links to other articles and unpublished papers in which those articles were cited. Many of these works are available here in full-text versions. This is by no means a substitute for the SSCI, but you might want to use it as a supplement.
Expanded Academic ASAP (Infotrac): This is a good source for searching both the scholarly and the general interest periodical literature on relatively recent issues. You can search in various ways using the drop-down menus on the advanced search page. This search engine often, although by no means always, provides you with the text of the articles that turn up in the search. You can limit the search by date, and also mark and save articles of interest. The search engine also allows you to use “proximity operators” to catch listings that contain search terms that occur within a certain number of words of each other. Suppose, for example, you wanted to see what Kissinger’s position was on the Iraq war. If you did an “entire document” search for “Kissinger n10 Iraq,” you’d get articles where the words “Kissinger” and “Iraq” were within 10 words of each other; those articles are broken down by tabs (Academic Journals, Magazines, News, etc.). If you do a subject search (e.g., for “Kissinger”) and an inordinately large number of listings turn up, you may want to do a “Subject Guide Search” for the same term. The listings you’re led to will be divided up into more easily usable subdivisions (“Ethical Aspects,” “Records and Correspondence,” and so on).
JSTOR: JSTOR is probably the most important electronic archive for scholarly journals. People use it mainly to read specific articles they’ve already identified, articles that were published in one of the JSTOR journals. But you can also use it to identify articles dealing with particular topics. It has a very simple search engine. You can search in particular journals or in, say, just history or just political science journals (or both). You can search by author or by title (meaning by words or phrase in a title), and you can also do a full-text search. The search engine allows you to do all kinds of things. Suppose, for example, you wanted to see what leading political scientists had to say about the relative gains issue. You could begin by trying to see what Robert Jervis had to say about this issue. So you type “Jervis” in the author field and “relative gains” (with the quotation marks) in the full-text field. A number of listings turn up. Then, when you click into the link for a particular article, you’ll see a line just above the text of the article that says something like: “Your search term(s) occur 17 time(s) in this item.” That’s followed by a link that takes you to the pages that contain your search term.
It’s important to develop a certain familiarity with those three general search engines. By knowing how to use them, you will be able to identify articles in any area of scholarship you happen to be interested in. But there are more narrowly framed search engines you might also want to use for some purposes. CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online) is a subscription service, available through many research libraries. It allows you to search for scholarly works dealing with a specific topic. The editors control what gets included in the CIAO database, so not everything is included here. But the CIAO database includes things (like working papers) you can’t get elsewhere, and much of what turns up in a CIAO search is available in full-text format. The Lancaster Index to Defence and International Security Literature is “an on-line bibliographic database, indexed and cross-referenced, of journal articles and monographs dealing with military and security affairs.” It might well be worth checking out if you are interested in some military topic. Finally, if you are interested in the French periodical literature, you should use the Persee search engine. The search lists are linked to the full texts of the items that turn up.
In fact, there are a number of websites that you can look at if you’re interested in certain specific issues. Charles Lipson lists a number of them on his website: YaleGlobal Online (globalization); University of Minnesota Human Rights Library; Federation of American Scientists websites on such issues as Terrorism and WMD; and various websites related to issues like nuclear nonproliferation and international political economy. Lipson also has a page of his own, loaded with links, devoted to questions relating to the Middle East (including terrorism issues).
Dissertations as a rule have excellent bibliographies and lists of sources, so getting hold of a good one allows you to save a lot of time when you’re doing bibliographical work. And dissertations, as it turns out, are easy to identify and easy to get hold of.
To identify them, you now have to use the ProQuest search engine. (This is a subscription service. UCLA is a subscriber and you can get access to it from computers on campus.) When you go into that search engine, in the “database” field, select “Interdisciplinary—Dissertations and Theses” from the drop-down menu. In the first field, select either “Document title” or, for more hits, “Citation and abstract.” Then put in the terms you’d like to search for, combining them with various operators (described in the link on the top right of the search page called “search tips”). For example, suppose you’re interested in the Sino-Soviet split. You can use a term like:
((sino-soviet) OR (soviet W/4 chin*)) AND (dispute OR conflict OR split)
The asterisk enables you to capture variant words (e.g., “Chinese” as well as “China”), and the “W/4” enables you to identify text where words like “Soviet” and “Chinese” are within four words of each other. You can limit the search in various ways (e.g., limiting it to international relations dissertations by selecting “international relations” from the “Look up subjects” list). The listings contain a good deal of information about the specific dissertations that turn up in the search. It’s very easy to order the dissertations you’re interested in directly from that listing. Dissertations can generally be sent to you as email attachments in pdf format. You can also set up an alert to be notified of new results for your search as they become available.
You can often get a good sense for what a particular area of scholarship is like by looking at syllabi that have been prepared for courses in that area. A syllabus will list what the instructor considers to be the most important works in the field, or at least the relatively small number of works that students new to the field should read. If you read a series of syllabi, you’ll also notice that the same works tend to get listed over and over again—and this, of course, gives you a certain sense for what is considered important in the field.
Syllabi are not hard to get hold of nowadays. Quite a few of them are available online. To save you a bit of trouble, I put a number of good (mostly political science) syllabi online and provided links to a number of others. For that list, which also provides some advice about finding both history and political science syllabi, click here. It also has links to a number of collections of syllabi (for both history and political science courses) available online, to a couple of Ph.D. exam reading lists in international relations (for Yale and the University of Chicago), and to lists of both history and political science department websites. Finally, you might be interested in the sort of syllabi that were used thirty-odd years ago. It turns out that a collection of such syllabi was published in 1970:
Charles F. Hermann and Kenneth N. Waltz, editors and compilers, Basic Courses in Foreign Policy: An Anthology of Syllabi (1970)
It’s always interesting to see what people think of the books you’ve read, are reading, or even are just thinking of reading. And it’s not hard to locate book reviews and get access to them electronically.
To get reviews of scholarly and semi-scholarly books, you can use some common computerized search engines, including three I’ve talked about before. Here’s how to use them for this purpose.
To find book reviews published in a JSTOR journal: first, go into the JSTOR advanced search window, put a phrase from the title (in quotation marks) in the “full text” field, put the name of the book’s author in the “author” field, check the box for “review,” then click “search.” You can also limit your search to journals in a particular discipline or even to a single journal.
Next, to find reviews published in one of the journals covered by Project MUSE, another important electronic scholarly journal archive: first click “article search,” then in the “search for” box, type in the name of the author or the title of the book you’re interested in. In the drop-down menu in the next box, click “author reviewed” (or “title reviewed,” if you typed in the title) and then click the search button.
The third search engine you can use is the Expanded Academic ASAP. Using either the basic search or the advanced search window, do a keyword search, typing the following into the entry box: the author’s last name, a word or a short phrase from the book’s title, and then the phrase “and book reviews” (without the quotation marks). For example, type in “Waltz and spread of nuclear and book reviews,” to get reviews of the book Kenneth Waltz co-authored with Scott Sagan on The Spread of Nuclear Weapons.
You can also use the Web of Science to find book reviews. In the basic search window, in the topic field, type in the (short) title (in quotation marks) of the book you’re interested in plus the last name of the author (for example: “Strategies of Containment” Gaddis). Then click “search.”
For less scholarly reviews, various online sources are listed in AcqWeb's Directory of Book Reviews on the Web. This has links to such sources as The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, The Boston Review, Le Monde - Livres, and so on.
VI. H-Diplo and H-Net: You can also search for reviews posted on one of the h-net historians’ email discussion groups by using the h-net reviews search engine. Just go into that link and type in the author’s last name and the title of the book in the corresponding fields under “bibliographic data.” But a particular book might be discussed in one of the h-net groups in a more informal way. To see if it’s been discussed, you can search for that title on the general h-net advanced search page. You should probably choose to search by phrase (rather than by keyword). You can limit the search by particular discussion list (you could select h-diplo, for example) and also by date. You can search either in the whole text or in the subject line. Alternatively, you can click into “H-Diplo Reviews” (listed there alphabetically by author’s last name) and “H-Diplo Roundtables” (discussions on what were considered the most important books). What turns up is often quite interesting.
H-Diplo, I should also note in this context, regularly publishes discussions of articles published in the main journals in the field. Some of them, like the discussion of Eduard Mark’s article on “The War Scare of 1946 and Its Consequences” (Diplomatic History, vol. 21, no. 3, summer 1997), are of quite extraordinary interest. To view a particular thread of this sort, go into the general h-net advanced search page, type in (in quotation marks) a key phrase from the title (e.g., “War Scare of 1946”), select “phrase” and then “h-diplo” as the list to be searched in, select “subject line” as the search field, and then click “search.”
VII. Videos: There’s one last thing you might want to do when you’re trying to get a feel for what a given area of scholarship is like. You can actually watch or listen to people giving talks on some subject you’re interested in. In some cases, those people are prominent scholars—people whose books and articles you might already be familiar with—and seeing them in action will give you a much stronger sense for what’s distinctive about their approach to the subject. Listening or better yet watching these talks, it’s as though a whole new dimension of meaning opens up: people express themselves quite freely when they’re talking informally (whereas in written work, they tend to be more guarded), and both tone of voice and body language can also be quite revealing. This sort of source is particularly useful if you are dealing with some contemporary topic. Here are links to some of the more interesting sources of this sort:
UChannel: “videos of academic lectures and events,” mostly from major U.S. universities, with a “with a focus on public and international affairs.” For lists of videos dealing with a certain topic (“Foreign Policy,” “Iraq,” “Security,” “Nuclear,” etc.), click the topic that interests you in the list at the top of the homepage.
MIT World: In the “video finder” on the top right, choose a category like “international affairs” or “national security affairs” or choose a host like the Center for International Studies. There are good videos here on such topics as the North Korea nuclear problem (Gallucci) and the future of U.S.-China relations (Christensen, Van Evera).
Berkeley Webcast course IAS 180 on “Issues in Foreign Policy after 9/11” (webpages for spring semesters, 2002-2006). Terrific video lectures by people like Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, Robert Gallucci, Josef Joffe, and so on. To see what is available, go into the Berkeley Webcast course list, select the listing for a spring semester from 2002 to 2006, or for the fall semester of 2007, and then click into the link for IAS 180.
Institute of Politics, JFK School of Government, Harvard University, JFK Jr. Forum Video Archive. Videos of panel discussions and lectures of topical issues going back to 1998.
Council on Foreign Relations. Lectures, interviews, and panel discussions, on contemporary issues. Transcripts, audios, and videos.
Foreign Policy Research Institute: links to videos of recent talks; audio versions are also available