Social Sciences Library Resources
Our university libraries provide many academic resources to help you through your studies. The most prominent of these will of course be the books. Whether it be physically in the libraries or e-books available through library search. Alongside these, we also provide you with access to hundreds of online academic databases and journal collections. Through these, you can study academic articles and essays stretching back decades and covering a wide range of subject areas. Today, we will briefly introduce you to some of the resources available for studying Social Sciences.
Social Sciences Resources
Social Sciences at Napier falls under our School of Applied Sciences. As such the primary collection of Social Sciences books can be found in LRC 3 of the library in our Sighthill Campus,. But there are smaller collections found in the libraries of our Craiglockhart and Merchiston campuses. This collection is overseen by Catriona Robertson, the Subject Librarian for the School of Applied Sciences. And Cat is happy to provide you with any study support or advice when you’re carrying out social science research.
Through our library libguides portal, you can locate over thirty academic social science databases. These consist of access to academic journals and articles. Once you access any of these databases, you can login using your Napier student account via the Institutional Login option. Included in these databases is JSTOR, one of the internet’s most popular academic databases. You can access thousands of journal articles, research reports, and even full e-books. JSTOR is not a specialised service, providing countless articles across all topics. So it can be a great way to begin research into whichever topic it is that you’re studying.
Similar to JSTOR is ProQuest, which has the added benefit of being able to search via specialised collections of subject matter. ProQuest includes its own premium Social Sciences collection. This goes for an in-depth search into more specialised and niche topics in Social Sciences. The ProQuest Social Sciences Collection consists of a range of specialised collections such as the Criminology collection, Politics collection, and Sociology collection. But there is much more. This ensures that any searches you make will return results from relevant academic journals and e-books, instead of having to wade through irrelevant results that only lightly touch on the subject you are interested in.
An example of one of the more specialised resources we have available is Digimap, an online collection of digital maps. These include historical ordnance maps, demographic maps, or geological maps, with the format of the maps including traditional maps as well as aerial photography or 3d renderings. This could be a great resource for historical or sociological research, such as looking at how demographics have shifted over time or using older ordnance maps to track changes in city layouts. This can be useful for in-depth and niche study into specialised areas of social sciences. These are just a brief look into only a few of the social sciences resources available through the university library. Remember that if you’re interested in checking out more you can always have a read through what’s available on the university LibGuides page or contact Cat, the subject librarian for the School of Applied Sciences.
By Matthew Ferrie
Our databases cover a wide range of subjects, read our previous posts.
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