Searching Tips
When searching within the databases, keep the following tips in mind:
- Select Peer reviewed or Refereed to view articles from scholarly journals
- Enter in keywords rather than full sentences
- Limit by publication date to retrieved articles published within a specific time frame
Keywords and Phrases
Use the following search terms, keywords, and phrases in QuickSearch to locate articles about that topic. Remember, you can combine search terms using Boolean Operators. You can add keywords related to other disciplines to help narrow the results; for example: history, politics, literature, education, STEM, etc.
- Women or woman
- Women's Rights
- Women's Suffrage
- Women's History
- Feminism
- Femininity
- Gender
- Gender Disparity
- Gender Identity
- Gender Fluidity
- Lesbians
- Bisexual Women
Boolean Operators
Use Boolean Operators as a way to narrow or broaden your search:
AND: use to combine different concepts or keywords; each result will contain all search terms
Example: gender AND libraries
OR: use to connect similar concepts or keywords; each result will contain at least one of the search terms
Example: medicine OR health
NOT: use to exclude words or concepts; tells the database to ignore concepts implied by your search
Example: technology NOT database
Parentheses ( ): place around related terms to search for more than one group of keywords
Example: (teaching OR education) AND gender
Asterisk *: use at the end of a keyword to search words that start with the same letters
Example: education AND femini*
Quotation marks “ ”: place around phrases to search for words in that exact order
Example: “women's rights” AND teaching
Databases
- Women's Studies International This link opens in a new window
Discover literature from core disciplines in women's studies and the latest scholarship in feminist research. Search womens literature and selected bulletins, reports, dissertations, NGO studies, and grey literature. NISC produces the index.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States This link opens in a new window
Study the history of US women and their role in social change between 1600 and 2000. Search primary documents, reviews, archive notes, and teaching tools. Includes local, state, and federal level commission reports. The resource will be useful to anyone studying women's issues and curriculum developers.
- Gender Studies Database This link opens in a new window
GSD covers the full spectrum of gender-engaged scholarship inside and outside academia. Links to free and subscription based full-text articles. Includes professional journals, conference papers, books, government reports, discussion papers, theses and dissertations.
- LGBTQ+ Source This link opens in a new window
LGBTQ+ Source contains literature on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues. Indexes LGBTQ+ specific journals, magazines, regional newspapers, books, and reference works.
- SocINDEX This link opens in a new window
Search extensively indexed books, monographs, and conference papers. This index features citations with subject headings from a sociology-specific thesaurus designed by expert lexicographers. SocINDEX covers all subdisciplines of sociology such as anthropology, criminology, demography, ethnic, racial, and gender studies, marriage, family, and social structures, and social work.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Get full-text access to magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals in the sciences, social sciences, business, education, and the humanities. Full-text may be available via Find-It. Useful place to begin broad searches for general topics.
- QuickSearch
QuickSearch combines results from many search tools for you to review in one list. Results come from the Wright State catalog and hundreds of library databases including all of our Ebscohost databases, JSTOR, the Web of Science, and others.
Select Journals
- Advancing Women in Leadership
Full Text: 08/01/2008 to present
Includes manuscripts that report, synthesize, review, or analyze scholarly inquiry that focuses on women's issues. - Feminist Review
Full Text: 01/01/1999 to present
The major women's studies journal in Britain including articles on contemporary feminist analysis, changing political issues and book reviews. - Journal of Women's History
Full Text: 03/25/1991 - 06/25/1994, 06/25/1996 to present
Articles and review essays of historical work by women. - Women's Studies
Full Text: 12/01/1972 to present (Full Text Delay: 18 months)
Articles, review articles, poetry, short fiction, film and book reviews of scholarship and criticism about women in the fields of literature, history, art, sociology, law, political science, economics, anthropology and the sciences.