Find books

SFU Library catalogue search guide

Search using the SFU Library Catalogue's basic search or the advanced search.

To find a specific book, use "Browse by "title"

Use the Browse Search option in the SFU Library Catalogue.  Select "Title" (drop-down menu) and enter term.

To search for a topic using keywords

Search using the SFU Library Catalogue's basic search or the advanced search.

• femini* AND research method*  (limit to "Books", using the pull down menu)
• "women of color" AND femini*"
• "transnational femini*"
• (gay OR transgender OR lesbian* OR queer OR LGBT*) AND rights

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Select, "Source Types" as "Books" or in the results list, limit the results by selecting, "Books" limiter (left-hand column)

Browse by "subject"

Use the Browse Search option in the SFU Library Catalogue.  Select "Subject" (drop-down menu), and enter term.

• Feminism
• Feminism -- Africa (try names of other countries or regions for their feminist movements)
• Feminism -- History
• Feminism -- Research
• Feminist theory
• Feminists
• Feminists -- Biography
• Mixed methods -- Research
• Women's rights

Journal articles and literature reviews

How to find journal articles | Find a Peer-Reviewed Article in Social Science Journals

• Women's Studies International - for any issues related to gender, sexuality and women's studies
• ProQuest Sociology Collection - International literature in sociology. Searches multiple databases including: Applied Social Science Index, ProQuest Sociology Database, Social Services Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts.
• Social Sciences Full Text - Broad coverage of social science journals
• Academic Search Premier -- Covers many GSWS journals. "Limit" search results to "academic" or "scholarly" sources

Literature reviews

While there is no single "literature review" journal for this discipline, the two databases (below) will provide literature review types of articles.

• Annual Reviews - literature review types of articles from anthropology, criminology, economics, environment, genomics and human genetics. law, political science, public health, sociology and more.
• Oxford Bibliographies Online - provides "literature reviews" for topics in anthropology, African studies, geography, international relations, Islamic studies, Latin American studies, political science, sociology and more.

For Canadian topics:

• CBCA Complete - covers scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers. Limit results to "scholalry" or "academic"
• Canadian Newsstream - covers Canadian newspapers, including Vancouver Sun, Globe & Mail
• Canada Commons (formerly, Canadian Electronic Library from desLibris) - for public policy documents from Canadian institutes, think-tanks and research groups.

For a more complete list of databases, try: Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies databases

Citation searching

To find out who is citing your key sources, try "citation" searches using:

• Google Scholar
• Web of Science - Use the "cited reference" search option.    

Google searching

Search tips for Google, Google Scholar, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines

• Use intitle: to force the search engine to find those words in the titles of results
  • intitle:airport  intitle:security
• Use site: to specify results from a particular web site or top-level domain
  • site:gov
• Can search for filetype:pdf

Evaluate sources and avoid plagiarism

Evaluating sources

Once you've found a web resource related to your topic, evaluating its reliability is the critically important final step. Make sure to ask the basic questions: Who? What? Where? When? and Why?

Understanding and avoiding plagiarism [interactive tutorial]

New books

Interested in what new books the Library is getting for Women’s Studies?