Political ReviewNet features book reviews in all the major sub-disciplines of Politics and International Relations. Excerpted from several specialized journals, each review is written by acknowledged experts and scholars covering a vast array of subjects related to Political Science. The site’s large database offers simple and effective searching tools (by author, title or subject keyword) to freely access material dating back to January 2001 and regularly updated. Set up and maintained by Blackwell Publishing, over 750 book reviews and references are annually added. Political ReviewNet also includes direct links to each featured journal in order to facilitate further (paid) access to many prominent titles in the International Political Science field — such as Political Quarterly, Governance, Journal of Common Market Studies, Middle East Policy, Australian Journal of Public Administration. Addressed to the general public and specialists as well, the site offers also two online application forms to become a reviewer and to request a book for review. Its simple interface allows for an intuitive and user-friendly access to the content.
Political ReviewNet
Politics and international relations book reviews
Political Studies Review
A review service for Political Science books in English
Launched and maintained by the British Political Studies Association, Political Studies Review is an authoritative database of new books and literature on Political Science and International Relations. Working in a timely and comprehensive way, the Association editors select 450-500 books a year for review, among the over 1500 titles submitted yearly. This website offers immediate and free access to every review published since January 2000. Often published months ahead of their book print publication, these reviews are divided in eight subject areas with monthly updates. An important feature of Political Studies Review is book-ordering in partnership with Amazon, with a direct link from the title of the book one is interested in. Also easily available are links to such features as Current Books Reviewed Online, How to Become a Reviewer as well as to Political Science Journal (paid membership required for full access) and the Political Science Guide with links to universities, associations and job opportunities. Recently Political Studies and Political Studies Review moved to the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, and a new editorial team is in charge to keep the site up-to-date.
Project Muse
A Johns Hopkins University Press database
Project MUSE was launched in 1995 by the Johns Hopkins University Press, in collaboration with the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, to offer the online full-text version of J.H. Univ. Press scholarly journals. Currently, Project MUSE® offers nearly 250 journal titles from 40 scholarly publishers, covering the fields of literature and criticism, history, visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics and others. Project MUSE is therefore focused on scholarly electronic journals in the humanities and social sciences. To fully access the Muse database, a subscription is needed but it is available only to institutions, which can also have a free trial up to 60 days. Subscribers access the full-text versions in html or pdf format of all included journals from their first online issue. Project MUSE also allows ample free info retrieval for individuals and simple visitors. Non-members can retrieve all articles up to the abstract level in the Muse database. Brief annotations on authors and articles are also available as well as links to other web gateways and research databases. Project MUSE has also developed a reciprocal linking project with JSTOR, with links to back issues from a growing selection of 25 journal titles available in both resources.
Redalyc
Full-text content from many Latin America scientific publications
An impressive portal managed by the and Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico providing full-text content from a variety of scientific publications in Latin America countries. Organized in two main areas (Social and Natural Sciences) and many specialised sub-sections, Redalyc gathers journals published in more than 15 countries, with over 758 riviste scientifiche; 16,845 journals and 208,400 articles available in pdf format, along with abstracts, reference info and other metadata. Similarly to parallel projects such as Latindex, this portal fully embraces the Open Access policy and its material is released under a Creative Commons license, with free download. Along with a keyword search on each page, users can browse the catalogue by title, author, country or subject and they also submit original papers in .doc, .rtf or .odt formats, to be included in a specific journal. The outline is essentially text-based and lacking many usability functions, but it’s easy to navigate and provides small banners and search windows (with related html code) to be pasted on anybody’s website as a promotional tool. They now have a Twitter account and a Facebook page both providing daily updates, as well as the mobile application.
Revues.org
A gateway to a French collection of scientific journals
Launched in 1999 as an offspring of the Département des sciences de l’homme et de la société, under the scientific management of CNRS, Revues.org is the oldest collection of France’s online journals. It actually collects more than 30 0 reviews and 22 book-collections. Directly and independently developed by the scientific community as an entry point to social sciences references, Revues.org aims at improving accessibility to these journals by gathering them in a single and consistent environment, and also by widening the partnership with several French institutions (École nationale des chartes, Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme, Centre de communication scientifique, several universities, etc.). This website features a specialized search engine for the social sciences (In-extenso, now called OpenEdition), which covers resources selected and collected by another affiliated (and directly linked) website, l’Album des Sciences Sociales. While each of them has its own characteristics, taken together these tools provide a powerful instrument to browse and search the research field in French. The section called “In-extenso” provides also a second search space covering journal titles and abstracts of about 200,000 articles, while over 1,000,000 webpages are regularly indexed. The entire reference material, as well as any other content, is freely and fully accessible. OpenEdition now includes two more projects, Calenda, the social science calendar, and Hypotese.org, a publication platform for academic blog.
SciELO
Latin America academic & scientific publications
The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) is a model for cooperative electronic publishing of scientific journals on the Internet. Conceived for enhancing scientific production and communication of Latin American and Caribbean countries SciELO provides an efficient way to assure universal accessibility to their scientific literature. It enables many services, from the online publication of complete editions of scientific journals to the organization of searchable bibliographical and full-text databases, from the preservation of electronic archives to the production of statistical indicators of the Ibero American scientific literature usage and impact. Full texts are enriched with dynamic hypertext links with national and international databases, and direct links to electronic journals are provided as well. The SciELO is available in three languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese and a special Social Sciences English Edition is available for the international public. SciELO covers many disciplines and many social sciences journals are present. All contents are, consistently with its mission, provided for free and can be downloaded usually in pdf format. Journals and contents can be browsed by country, topic or alphabetically, and a simple search feature is also available. Navigation and orientation are therefore quite comfortable.
Social Science Research Network
A virtual research network in the social sciences
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a project co-hosted by Stanford Law School, Chicago Booth, Korea University and the European Corporate Governance Institute and is composed by a number of research networks in the social sciences and related fields (economy, law, social insurance, management). Aimed at connecting the business and professional world to the social sciences, this website provides access to hundreds of articles, abstracts, journals, publishers, and institutions through SSRN’s eLibrary. It includes an Abstract Database, with about 390,000 summaries of scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers, and an Electronic Paper Collection, with more than 320,000 downloadable full text documents in pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications, with various options aimed at encouraging readers to communicate directly with authors and other subscribers concerning their own and others’ research. A free trial for abstracts is offered to any user, while full access to SSRN material is through an institutional affiliation and almost all records can be retrieved and downloaded for free from the eLibrary (which receives more than 30,000 papers each six months). An advanced search facility is provided and several visual tips help users to successfully navigate the site’s many pages.
SpringerLink
Springer Media's online data source for researchers and scientists
SpringerLink is an online information service for scientific books and journals, especially in the fields of mathematics, environmental and physical sciences, engineering, computer and biosciences, but also including humanities, social and behavioural sciences. Through its search features, SpringerLink offers free access to almost 5,400,000 documents, including tables of contents and latest issues abstracts of more than 2,700 journals, references for over 50,000 books and endless entries in the subject collection and in a variety of specialized areas. All former Kluwer Academic journals are available here, along with more than 200 publications related to social sciences. The journals full-text content is available (in pdf or html formats) only to paid subscribers, both individual or institutional. Registration is not required to view abstracts or tables of contents, but registered registered users are entitled to personalize the site’s features and to other benefits. Beside a simple keyword search option in the homepage, a more advanced search facility is also available, along with a comprehensive FAQ file. Overall, this is a large interactive databases for high-quality material and references, targeting particularly researchers and scientists worldwide.
The Law and Politics Book Review
A specialized service by the APSA Law and Court Section
The Law and Politics Book Review, sponsored by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association and maintained by The Institute for Law and Society at New York University School of Law, presents a comprehensive database of law and political science book reviews. LPBR indicates it reviews almost every book about the legal process and politics, offering longer reviews than are usually published, and making the reviews available within six months of the reception of the book. LPBR material starts from March 1991 and is updated monthly. Past issues and reviews remain available, browsable, searchable and retrievable by all users for free. Free subscription is available, giving subscribers some additional services as a book notice, providing a brief summary of the contents of reference works, previously published materials, textbooks, later editions of books previously reviewed and other publications since 1999. Subscribers can also receive the full-text reviews by email or receive notices of new reviews as they are published, with links to their location on the LPBR website. A very simple search feature is available for retrieving material in the Review’s issues. A customizable advanced search feature in the LPBR website is also possible through Google search. The whole website is very clear to be navigated. Some selected links are provided as well.
The Universal Digital Library
A million book collection
A partnership effort lead by the Carnegie Mellon University, with several servers, mirror-sites and 50 scanning centers hosted all over the world, this ambitious project aims at preserving and making freely available the human knowledge in digital format – planning to reach 10 million books within the next 10 years. The content currently available spans from the XVI century to 2007, in over 20 language and about 50 topics of general interest, from Education to Geography, to Drama, Health, Biology, etc., for a total of over 1,1 million books – even if the while the project seems to have stopped in early 2008. The UDL has books that are both in and out of copyright (that is, published after or before 1923), and adheres to copyright policies of all countries in the strictest possible interpretation. Along with a simple title search and advanced options, such as by year, subject, author, etc. users can also browse the collection by subject, language, year, author or title alphabetical order. For viewing UDL books, users need either a DjVu plugin and/or a Tiff plug-in, while the project has future plans to provide book content directly as pdf files – along with future initiatives aimed at creating digital libraries for newspapers, monuments, and spoken languages. The website is quite simple and easy to navigate, also providing tips and FAQ, but lacks any social option.
