Don’t-Miss Database: Women’s Studies International

Post contributed by Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

Women’s Studies International (WSI) provides the latest scholarship in gender and feminist research. Providing access to over seven hundred publications covering the core literature of the field of women’s and gender’s studies, it is a valuable interdisciplinary resource spanning sociology, history, international relations, political science, as well as the arts and humanities. The database includes journal articles, newsletters, books, book chapters, reports, and grey literature focused on gender and women’s studies with date coverage from 1972 to the present.

Why Should You Use This?

According to Cindy Ingold, in her comparison of Women’s Studies library databases in Library Trends, WSI is the best database for the indexing of women’s studies journals in terms of number of titles covered, dates of coverage, and number of citations available for each title. WSI includes a large percentage of women’s studies core journals like Feminist Review, Hypatia, and Signs. With linking technologies available such as the SFX link resolver, providing access to the full text of journals in Women’s Studies International is now routine.

Cool Features

Like all library databases provided by Proquest and EBSCOhost, it’s easy to build relevant searches, apply limits like language, document type (like book chapter or conference paper), and peer reviewed, and search within the full text of online resources. When you delve into an individual record, you can find subject terms and author-supplied keywords that are hot-linked and will lead you to other resources and themes. WSI also includes video content from news organizations. I enjoyed watching a clip of “Japan’s ambassador of cute – Hello Kitty.”

Database Tips

You can search across multiple databases from the EBSCOhost platform. In addition to WSI, you can “Choose Databases” above the main search box and add other relevant databases like “Humanities International Complete,” “Historical Abstracts” and/or “Political Science Complete.” In women-focused databases, such as Women’s Studies International  and GenderWatch, there’s usually no need to put “women” into your search, except where “women” is already part of the term.

Similar Resources

Other online databases for Women’s and Sexuality Studies include Gender Watch and an array of excellent primary source databases like LGBT Thought and Culture, Women’s Magazine Archive, Black Women Writers, and Women and Social Movements in multiple parts.   You can access these resources on our Research Databases page, under Subjects—Women’s & Sexuality Studies.

Questions?

Contact Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Cinematic Arts / Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies / Theater Studies