Appendix I: Identifying the Scholarly Literature
Supplement to Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History (Princeton University Press, 2006)
Last revised: August 2026
When you begin work on a particular topic, you’ll obviously want to see what’s already been written about it. It’s therefore important to know how to identify those books and articles. And you might also want to learn a bit about some broader area of scholarship that relates to the work you intend to do. I dealt with these matters in a general way in the book, but I’ll talk in more detail here about how bibliographical work of this sort can be done—about the guides and search engines you can use and about other ways of proceeding.
Anyone can use this website, but the call numbers, when given, are for books in the UCLA library. Other libraries using the Library of Congress classification system, however, might use the same call numbers. Some of the links are for people connected with UCLA. But if you can’t get those links to work, you can often get access to those sources by going through a library website you do have access to. Since websites die and are redesigned all the time, and since URLs are also always changing, I’ve been updating this appendix periodically. I’ll try to continue doing so for as long as I can, but my website will probably not remain on the UCLA server forever. If it does disappear, however, this appendix should still be available on the Internet Archive website at archive.org. Just search there for the present URL (http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/methbk/AppendixI.html). Most of the linked items have also been archived there.
Contents of Appendix I:
Bibliographies,
Guides and Related Works
Web of Science (Social Science Citation Index),
Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)
I. Bibliographies, Guides and
Related Works
In Chapter Three of the book I talked about a number of ways you could learn about what might be for you a new area of scholarly inquiry. One of your goals when you are beginning a project would be to develop a certain sense for what that field of scholarship is like—for the questions people in that field are interested in, for what the most important works are, for what the prevailing interpretations are, for the debates people have, and so on. But at some point you might want to do a more thorough search for works relating more directly to the specific topic you’re interested in. If so, there are various online search engines you could use.
Probably the best place to start would be the Institut für Zeitgeschichte’s online catalog. (If you don’t read German, the catalog is also available in English and French—the links are on the top of the page.) In the “IfZ-Systematik” (or, in English, the “IfZ-classification”) field enter a notation number corresponding to a particular subject. You can also fill in the title/keyword, subject, or author fields. You can identify the notation numbers by consulting the IfZ organizational guide; this is in German, but you can translate it automatically by using the translate tool on your browser. Clicking into the general notation numbers for broad categories in the organizational guide will take you into parts of the guide listing particular topics and also giving the notation numbers for specific subjects. This search engine is not just for books; the hits will include journal articles. You can limit the search in various ways and save items of interest to a list, which you can then save or print out.
For the literature on U.S. policy, your best bet is to use the SHAFR Guide Online: An Annotated Bibliography of U.S. Foreign Relations since 1600, which you can often access through your library’s website. This is a successor to a massive two-volume annotated bibliography published in 2003: Robert Beisner, ed., American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature (Santa Barbara, Calif. : ABC-CLIO, 2003) Z6465.U5 G84 2003. See also Richard Immerman’s Bibliography on U.S. Diplomatic History, 1918-1975, and the Books page from Nick Sarantakes’s U.S. Diplomatic History Resources Index. 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.
For bibliographies relating to other countries or to specific topics, note especially the collection of online bibliographies dealing with international relations in the Oxford Bibliographies series (a subscription service). It currently (2026) lists 334 bibliographies, dealing with specific topics like the Arab-Israeli conflict. If you are interested in any of the topics covered by the Digital National Security Archive (described in Appendix II), click the link for “browse” on the homepage, then click the link for “bibliographies” and select the particular collection you’re interested in. The bibliography linked to the Kissinger Transcripts collection, for example, includes 60 titles. And there are many other bibliographies available online dealing with particular topics, for example:
Bibliography on the History of Europe during the East-West Conflict (very well-organized, German-language list)
Selective Bibliography on the Cold War Alliances (Parallel History Project)
History of European Integration Research Society (HEIRS) (see their links page)
Korean War bibliography (Kenneth Robinson, comp.; supplements Keith D. McFarland's The Korean War: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986)
James I. Matray, “Korea's War at 60: A Survey of the Literature,” Cold War History 11, no. 1 (2011)
The Internet and the Bomb: A Research Guide to Policy and Information about Nuclear Weapons (William Arkin and Robert Norris, Natural Resources Defense Council) (Internet Archive capture). Note also Untangling the Web, a guide prepared by the National Security Agency for its internal use (last update 2007).
Books and articles on nation-building, peace-support operations and crisis management (NATO Review)
Iraq Wars bibliography (Ed Moïse)
Vietnam War Bibliography (Ed Moïse)
Mary Ann Heiss and Peter L. Hahn, bibliographical essay on U.S. relations with the Third World (part of their book Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945 (Ohio State University Press, 2001), pp. 279-84.
On China:
“Contemporary China: A Book List” (Lynn White and Lubna Malik; 2008). 77 pages, with sections on Sino-American relations, China’s policies toward Russia and Japan, collections of documents, and so on.
M. Taylor Fravel, “Online and on China: Research Sources in the Information Age," The China Quarterly, No. 163, September 2000, pp. 821-42.
Charles Kraus, “Researching the History of the People’s Republic of China,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 79 (April 2016)
Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (2008) online bibliography (link)
David Shambaugh, “Bibliographical Essay on New Sources for the Study of China’s Foreign Relations and National Security,” in Thomas Robinson and David Shambaugh, eds., Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (1994) (available online on the ProQuest database through some libraries)
On military issues:
Eliot Cohen’s Strategic Studies Core Readings (2004)
Neufeld, Schaffel and Shermer, “Guide to Air Force Historical Literature, 1943-1983” (258 pp., 1983); released via mandatory declassification review; contains listings of internal Air Force histories, many based on classified material.
U.S. Army War College bibliographies (American military history, peacekeeping, irregular warfare, etc.)
U.S. Naval War College Library Research Guides
On intelligence matters:
Literature of Intelligence: A Bibliography of Materials, with Essays, Reviews, and Comments (J. Ransom Clark)
Intelligence Literature (CIA)
Intelligence and Policy-Making: A Bibliography (Greta Marlatt, Naval Postgraduate School)
Diplomacy, International Affairs, & Intelligence (Georgetown University; the section on intelligence begins on p. 54).
International Intelligence History Association
Loyola Homepage on Strategic Intelligence
Bibliography of the John E. Taylor collection (books about espionage and intelligence)
Intelligence, Espionage and Related Topics: An Annotated Bibliography of Serial Journal and Magazine Scholarship, 1844-1898 (James Calder, 1999) (SRLF)
Annotated Bibliography of the Open Literature on Deception (Zell Stanley, RAND, 1985)
Detecting Deception: A Bibliography of Counterdeception across Time, Cultures, and Disciplines (Barton Whaley, for Foreign Denial and Deception Committee, 2006)
U.S. Naval War College Library Research Guides (see guides on counterintelligence and intelligence studies
Note also 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.
But you might not want to limit yourself to online bibliographies and search engines. To begin with, as I noted in the text, you might want to take a look at some “state of the field” review articles, often written by experienced scholars in the area. Even older works of this sort might be worth reading when you’re trying to learn about a new field of scholarship. A number of these articles, dealing mostly with U.S. foreign policy, have been gathered together and published as books:
Frank Costigliola and Michael Hogan, eds., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Surveys of the literature on particular topics, originally published in the journal Diplomatic History. E744 .A486. An earlier version was published in 1995.
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.
If you’re interested in a particular topic, there are some (mostly older) published guides you might want to look at. These can often be found by doing a title search for a particular phrase (like “Cold War”) and, simultaneously, for a word like “guide,” “handbook,” “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. Or you can do a subject search in your library catalogue for something like “foreign relations” AND “bibliography” AND “Middle East” (or some other country or region). Here are some items that turn up when you do searches of that sort. Many are pretty old by now, but some might still be useful for some purposes, and looking up the title in your library catalogue and then clicking a subject link in the listing that turns up might enable you to find more up-to-date guides; one could also do a full text search for the titles in JSTOR (discussed below):
Gordon Martel, ed., A Companion to International History 1900-2001 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
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
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
G. Pope Atkins, Handbook of Research on the International Relations of Latin America and the Caribbean (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001)
Sanford Silverburg and Bernard Reich. United States Foreign Policy and the Middle East/North Africa: A Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Research (New York: Routledge, 2016)
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
For some projects, you might want to check out the International Relations Information Guide series put out by Gale in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Again, the catalogue listings for these items might have subject links which might direct you to more recent guides covering those topics:
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).
David Armstrong, ed., Routledge Handbook of International Law (New York: Routledge, 2009); Law KZ1250 .R68 2009
There is also an important series of “Guides to European Diplomatic History Research and Research Materials” covering the period from 1918 to 1945. These works discuss both primary and secondary sources, and although they’re all a little out-of-date, for some projects they still might be worth checking out:
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). [Note also the bibliography for course on Stuart Ball’s course on “British foreign and defence policy 1892-1968” (University of Leicester, 2015) (course syllabus with links to readings)
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 (new edition: Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013).
Robert J. Young, French Foreign Policy, 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1981).
A number of published guides deal with military affairs:
Richard Holmes, ed., Oxford Companion to Military History (2004) (available online through subscribing libraries)
John W. Chambers et al., eds., Oxford Companion to American Military History (2000) (available online through subscribing libraries)
Daniel K. Blewett , American Military History: A Guide to Reference and Information Sources (Second edition) (Westport: Libraries Unlimited, 2009).
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).
Robin Higham, ed. Guide to the sources of United States Military History (1975; supplements 1981 and 1986).
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
And if you’re interested in intelligence, you might want to look at some of the following publications:
Loch K. Johnson, ed., Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) (available online through the UCLA Library website)
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
James D. Calder, Intelligence, Espionage and Related Topics: An Annotated Bibliography of Serial, Journal, and Magazine Scholarship, 1844-1998 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).
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
Raymond Garthoff, “Foreign Intelligence and the Historiography of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 2 (2004); note especially the works listed in n.37.
Finally, if you would like to learn about the
political science literature on international relations, there are a number of
guides you should know about. You might
want to start, for example, with Annual Review of
Political Science, which 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.
The volumes on international relations in the Oxford
Handbooks in Politics & International Relations series might also be
worth looking it. Most of these volumes
are also available online through many university libraries. See especially:
Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan. Snidal, eds., The Oxford
Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
Alexandra Gheciu and William Wohlforth, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of International Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2018).
Saadia Pekkanen, John Ravenhill and Rosemary Foot,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Lisa Martin, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the
Political Economy of International Trade (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
Juliet Kaarbo and Cameron G. Thies, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2024).
Jon Pevehouse, The Oxford Handbook of International
Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025)
Barry Weingast and Donald Wittman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008)
The SAGE
Library of International Relations also includes many works of this
sort. See, for example:
Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth Simmons, eds.,
Handbook of International Relations (2nd
edition: London: SAGE, 2012)
Morten Valbjørn and Fred Lawson, eds., International
Relations of the Middle East (London: SAGE, 2015)
Judith L.Goldstein and Richard H. Steinberg, eds., International Institutions (London: SAGE, 2010) Brenda J. Lutz and James M. Lutz, eds., Global Terrorism (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2008) Adam Jones, ed., Genocide (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008) Ronald B. Mitchell, ed., International Environmental Politics (London: SAGE, 2008) ( 4 vols.) Daniel Druckman and Paul F. Diehl, eds., Conflict Resolution (London: SAGE, 2006) Paul F. Diehl, ed., War (London: SAGE, 2005) (6 vols.) Christer Jonsson and Richard Langhorne, eds., Diplomacy (London: Sage Publications, 2004) Another way to proceed is to look at one of the
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 being done, and about where the field is going. The articles in those volumes often cite what
are considered the most important works in that particular area. See, for
example, 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 the reader to other review articles.
For other works of this sort, see Michael Brecher and Frank Harvey,
eds., Millennial Reflections on International Studies (2002); 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 exactly the sort of
article you’d want to read if you were new to the field and wanted to see what
the field of International Political Economy was like. 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).
There are, in fact, all sorts of ways you can get some
sense for what a new field of scholarship is like. I remember when I first became interested in
the Cold War around 1980 and realized that I needed to learn something about
military, and especially nuclear, issues, one of the first things I looked at
was the old International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. by
David Sills and Robert Merton (1968). I
found a short article
there by Bernard Brodie on “Strategy” (vol. 17, pp. 281-87). It turned out to be perfect for my
purposes—even though at that time I had no idea that Brodie himself was a giant
in that field. But I’m sure that even if
I had not found that article I would have gotten a certain feel for that area of
scholarship in some other way. No matter
where you start, one work will lead to another, and pretty soon you’ll see the
same names and book titles cropping up again and again.
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. They’re all available online, at least in part. Unless otherwise noted, just search for the title in your library’s catalog.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Cryptologic Quarterly (National Security Agency)
Diplomacy
and Statecraft
Diplomatic History. Regularly carries survey-of-the-literature review articles.
Foreign Affairs
Available through both HeinOnline and JSTOR.
Book reviews: capsule reviews (link); review essays (link). Lists can be filtered by date, region, and topic
Francia (emphasis on France, Germany and Franco-German relations)
Historical Journal. Very broad coverage but has quite a few review articles relating to international politics.
Intelligence and National Security
International Affairs (London)
International History Review
International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence
International Organization
International Security
Teresa
Johnson, “Writing for International Security: A Contributor’s Guide”
International Studies Quarterly
Journal of American-East
Asian Relations
Journal of Cold War
Studies
Journal of Contemporary
History
Journal of European Integration History
Journal of Military
History (formerly Military
Affairs). Has a section on “recent
journal articles.”
Journal of Strategic Studies -
Problems of Communism and Problems of Post-Communism
Hathi Trust: 1952-92; UNZ.org: 1955-92
Relations internationales (1974 -
)
CAIRN (contents
for issues from 2000 on; some links to full text; all post-2000 articles freely
available here after three years)
Revue
d’histoire diplomatique
List
of articles published in this journal relating to the Cold War (1982-2010)
Security Studies
Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte
1953-
(direct links to issues, plus a link to an index) (English
version)
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 journal which articles have been published on a particular subject—and indeed which articles are particularly important. I’ll talk here about two in particular: the Social Science Citation Index (part of the Web of Science); 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: This search engine is a lot of fun to use once you get the hang of it. It allows you, first, to identify articles and other material 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 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 Web of Science? It’s a subscription service so you have to log in through your home library. You can search for an author, a title, or a subject. If you’re searching for an author, put in the author’s last name plus the first letter of his or her first name. Click “search” and a number of articles turn up. The listings have links to list of other articles that have cited it and to the sources cited in that article; they also have links to full text versions of the article. You can mark and save listings that you’re interested in and save the marked list to a bibliographic management program like EndNote.
JSTOR: JSTOR is 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), you can limit the search in various ways, and you can also do a full-text search.
JSTOR 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. You could then download the articles and search for terms like “relative gains.”
It’s important to develop a certain familiarity with those 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. Finally, if you are interested in the French periodical literature, you might want to take a look at the Persée search engine and the CAIRN website. Persée covers a relatively small number of periodicals of interest to people in our field (Cahiers du monde russe, Politique étrangère, Revue des études slaves, Vingtième Siècle and one or two others), but the listings its search engine generates are often linked to the full texts of the items that turn up.
Note, incidentally, that to manage the references you generate—to organize the material you’ve downloaded and cite that material correctly when you’re writing something up—it might make sense to use a program like EndNote or Zotero (free). I should say, however, that I personally bought EndNote and I ended up not using it at all.
.
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 can use the Dissertations & Theses page on the ProQuest search engine. (This is a subscription service, so you’ll have to go through your library’s website.) In the first field, select either “Document title” or, for more hits, select “abstract.” Then put in the terms you’d like to search for, combining them with various operators (described in the guide linked to the question mark on the top right of the homepage). 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 “subject” link on the right). The listings contain a good deal of information about the specific dissertations that turn up in the search. Most dissertations are now immediately downloadable free of charge; just click the “Full Text – PDF” link. 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.
Many syllabi 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 how to find 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). 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 online search engines, including two 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.
You can also use the Web of Science to find book reviews. 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 German book reviews, you might want to check out the Sehepunkte website (search engine); that site also has a special page listing reviews published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ reviews).
VI. H-Diplo and H-Net: You can also search for reviews posted on one of the h-net historians’ email 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. Many books and articles of interest to people in our field were discussed in various roundtables and review articles in H-Diplo’s partner website, the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum. To find items included there, it is best to do a Google Advanced Search, typing in the name of the person or book or article you’re interested in and putting https://issforum.org/ in the field for “site or domain.”
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.” For general information about H-Diplo, click here.
VII. Videos: There’s something else 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.” This was decommissioned in November 2010 but is archived on YouTube.
Hertog Global Strategy Initiative (Columbia): videos
MIT Center for International Studies YouTube channel
Foreign Policy Research Institute: links to videos of recent talks; audio versions are also available
London
School of Economics podcasts and videos
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
(Stanford) (iTunes)
VIII. Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) You can use the Internet Archive search engine
to find webpages which have been removed from the internet; older versions may well have been
archived. You can also use it to find
full-text versions of many scholarly books, especially older books. (At one time many other books were available
there, but the Archive had to remove many copyrighted works.) And you don’t have to limit yourself to title
searches. You can do a full-text search
for particular words or phrases (like “Yalta Conference” or “spheres of
influence”); that will help you identify
works that deal with issues you’re interested in. In the works that turn up you can search for
those same words or phrases and go directly to the passages that include them. You can often even do that for books whose
full-text versions have been withdrawn from the site. For instructions about how to construct a
search, click here.