Secondary Sources are secondhand sources. They were created by historians who drew their information from primary sources. The most typical types of secondary sources are books and academic journal articles.
WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information. You can search for popular books, music CDs and videos—all of the physical items you're used to getting from libraries. WorldCat can be used to verify citations, locate an item in another library, or to provide accurate citation information for inter-library loan requests. (Does not include citations to individual articles, stories in periodicals, or book chapters).
HathiTrust is a partnership of research institutions committed to digital preservation of the cultural record. The Digital Library provides access to public domain and some in-copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
Materials are available to the extent permitted by copyright law.
HathiTrust catalog records are included in Scout, but not in the Libraries’ Catalog.
Historians find some of their best books by browsing the shelves. Open the document below for a guide to browsing the Gorgas Library for history books:
Images of the full text of many scholarly titles in a range of subject areas, including literature, biological sciences, economics, finance, and statistics. Search the archive or pull up a specific article.
Project MUSE provides full-text access scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. The database is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and other university presses and not-for-profit publishers. Also included are the UPCC collections in Asian and Pacific Studies, and Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction.
Provides historical and cultural coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from journals published worldwide.
Google Scholar is a freely available scholarly search engine that allows you to search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles – from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
This is a freely accessible site. Contents may change without warning.
Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present.
Dissertations & Theses can be used as secondary sources and in some cases it may be easier to find a dissertation or thesis that addresses your specific topic.
Searchable and browsable database of dissertations and theses from around the world, 1743 to present.
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses: Global (PQDTGlobal) is the world's most comprehensive collection of full-text dissertations and theses. As the official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and as the database of record for graduate research, PQDTGlobal includes millions of searchable citations to dissertations and theses from 1861 to the present day together with over a million full-text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. Over 2.1 million titles are available for purchase as printed copies. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full-text coverage for older graduate works. It also includes PQDT UK & Ireland content.
More than 70,000 new full-text dissertations and theses are added to the database each year through dissertations publishing partnerships with 700 leading academic institutions worldwide, and collaborative retrospective digitization of dissertations. Full-text dissertations are archived as submitted by the degree-granting institution. Some will be native PDF, some PDF image.
Each dissertation published since July, 1980 includes a 350-word abstract written by the author. Master's theses published since 1988 include 150-word abstracts. Simple bibliographic citations are available for dissertations dating from 1637. Where available, PQDTGlobal provides 24-page previews of dissertations and theses.
Subject coverage
Note: Full text for certain publications is subject to market availability.