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Research on interdisciplinary issues and social problems can help inform public interest work. This page provides select WVU Libraries databases covering social issues. To find additional databases beyond this illustrative selection, visit the WVU Libraries databases homepage.
To find publicly available scholarship, see information on the research repository at WVU and the broader Digital Commons Network. The public also can visit WVU Libraries during applicable open hours.
Offers a good starting point for research on nearly any topic, covering most areas of academic study and containing full text for 5,500 periodicals, including 4,600 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to the full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,500 journals.
Covers North American (US and Canadian) history from prehistory to the present, providing references to journal articles, books, dissertations and reviews. America: History and Life covers over 2,000 journals published worldwide, including all key English-language historical journals and selected historical journals from major countries, state and local history journals.
Coverage of the people, elections, legislation, and controversies in the US Congress from 1945-2008, providing in-depth review and analysis of legislation and policy for each year, organized by policy area. Comprehensive roll call votes for all major legislation.
All EBSCOhost databases, cross-searchable, providing coverage for journal articles and other information in academic disciplines. Databases included are described on the database selection page. Many include links to full text of the articles indexed.
Comprehensive in coverage and international in scope, the Encyclopedia contains four hundred subject entries and two hundred brief biographies of key figures in the history of social work. Clearly arranged in A-Z format, each article is fully cross-referenced and includes a select bibliography to guide interested readers to primary sources and the most important scholarly works on a given subject.
Gender Studies Database combines Women's Studies International and Men's Studies databases with the coverage of sexual diversity issues and the full spectrum of gender-engaged scholarship inside and outside academia. Several thousand links to freely available and indexed full-text articles and documents on the Internet are available. Source documents include professional journals, conference papers, books, book chapters, government reports, discussion and working papers, theses & dissertations and other sources. Several hundred links provide access to carefully selected and important websites. This database includes more than 921,000 records with coverage spanning from 1972 and earlier to the present.
JSTOR is an archive of more than 1,000 scholarly, interdisciplinary journals, with full coverage for all but the most current 3-5 years. The entire archive is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
References to journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, microfiche, Internet material, and more. Newspapers and newsletters are not indexed. PAIS International includes publications from over 120 countries throughout the world. In addition to English, some of the indexed materials are published in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Political Handbook of the World 
Information on the major aspects of each country's government and political party system, including: heads of government, heads of state, ambassadors, historical trends, regime changes, constitutional history, and regional and global policy issues of concern.
Access to statistical information produced by US Federal agencies, states, private organizations, and major intergovernmental organizations. LNSI brings together a massive collection of statistical data in a single easy-to-use search interface, with additional features such as descriptive abstracts, detailed indexing, full-text PDFs of source documents and tables, down-loadable spreadsheets containing table data.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) 
The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 384,300 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 315,000 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
ProQuest's Sociology Database covers the international literature of sociology and social work, including relevant titles from related fields such as social policy, social care, social services, social anthropology, gender studies, gerontology, social psychology and population studies. It includes hundreds of full-text scholarly journals, as well as dissertations and other sources.
