Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including public administration/policy, international relations, and law. Over 1,700+ titles are being monitored for coverage; of these, 67% are published outside the United States. The database coverage is from 1975 to the present. It is updated monthly and approximately 35,000 records are added each year.
For practice exercises, click here.
Advanced Search makes it easy to perform field specific searches such as author, title, or keyword, construct Boolean searches, limit searches by database, publication type and date, and even specify the presentation of results.
On the Advanced Search page, you should see a search strategy area consisting of three rows with three search boxes per row as shown below.
Searching is not case sensitive, so you don't need to use capital letters.
If you enter multiple words into one search box (e.g., health nutrition) they will be searched for as a phrase. You can broaden your query by entering words or phrases in the additional search boxes in each row. You can also restrict your search to a particular field using the pull-down menus on the right.
Boolean operators and wildcards:
AND - Narrow search and retrieve records containing all of the words it separates.
OR - Broaden search and retrieve records containing any of the words it separates. The | can be used instead of 'or' (e.g., 'mouse | mice | rat' is equivalent to 'mouse or mice or rat').
NOT - Narrow search and retrieve records that do not contain the term following it.
( ) - Group words or phrases when combining Boolean phrases and to show the order in which relationships should be considered: e.g., '(mouse or mice) and (gene or pseudogene)
* - This is the truncation. This expands a search term to include all forms of a root word, e.g., patent* retrieves patent, patents, patentable, patented, etc.
* - Multi-character wildcard for finding alternative spellings. Use to indicate an unlimited number of characters within a word, e.g., behavi*r retrieves behaviour or behavior.
? - Single-character wildcard for finding alternative spellings. The ? represents a single character; two ?? represent two characters; three ??? represent three characters, and so on. Use within or at the end of a word, e.g., wom?n finds woman as well as women, and carbon fib?? finds carbon fiber or carbon fibre.
There is a Help link in the upper-right corner of every page with general searching information. Also, click on the question marks which are linked to more specific information.