Researching Covid-19, Pandemics and Society

Contact info

For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Sociology/Anthropology, Labour Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, moninder_lalli@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

You may also wish to check out the library guide: Global Health Information Resources for additional ideas.

Selected encyclopedias and handbooks

Use encyclopedias, dictionaries and handbooks to obtain definitions and overviews of a topic and also to identify key authors.

Databases for journal articles

How to find journal articles tutorial. 

What is a scholarly (or peer-reviewed) journal?

The databases below will provide articles on information technology and society.  If the full-text of the article is not available, use the "Get@SFU" link to find it.

  • Sociological Abstracts -- key database for sociology and anthropology journals and for issues such as structural inequalities
  • Global Health -- information on international health, biomedical life sciences, non-communicable diseases, public health nutrition, food safety and hygiene, and much more from around the world.
  • Academic Search Premier  Multidisciplinary index to academic & popular journals. Also indexes women's studies journals.
  • Bibliography of Asian Studies 
  • Social Sciences Full Text  Multi-disciplinary database
  • Women's Studies International - for any issues related to gender, sexuality and women's studies
  • Web of Science - Search citations and abstracts for journal articles, conference proceedings, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Can also be used for cited reference searches, and citation analysis of research.
  • GEOBASE: Covers human geography, including topics such as economic growth, sustainable development and economic impact
  • Historical Abstracts - Abstracts of journal articles, book reviews, dissertations on the history of the world outside, excluding Canada and the United States, since 1450. Access is limited to 6 users at a time. Users will be automatically logged out of the database after 12 minutes of inactivity.
  • Business Source Complete - For business, labour and economic aspects 
  • CBCA Full Text Business - Canadian focus: Trade journals, general business publications, academic journals, topical journals, and professional publications
  • Canada Commons (formerly, Canadian Electronic Library from desLibris) - for public policy documents from Canadian institutes, think-tanks and research groups.
  • Canadian Newsstream - covers Canadian newspapers, including Vancouver Sun, Globe & Mail
  • Google Scholar: Indexes articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies and preprint repositories
  • Annual reviews - Literature reviews and topic overviews in the sciences and social sciences. An excellent starting point for learning about a topic and for finding key articles on trending research.
  • E.g.
    • Ginestra, Mitchell, O. J. ., Anesi, G. L., & Christie, J. D. (2022). COVID-19 Critical Illness: A Data-Driven ReviewAnnual Review of Medicine73(1). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-med-042420-110629
    • Singer, Bulled, N., Ostrach, B., & Lerman Ginzburg, S. (2021). Syndemics: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Complex Epidemic Events Like COVID-19Annual Review of Anthropology50(1), 41–58. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-100919-121009
    • Taylor. (2022). The Psychology of Pandemics. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology18(1). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-072720-020131
    • Zhang, Yang, S., & Jia, P. (2022). Cultivating Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Socioecological Perspective. Annual Review of Psychology73(1). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-030221-031857

Databases for statistics

  • Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
    A central repository and dissemination service for machine-readable social science data. The Archive receives, processes, and distributes data on social phenomena occurring in over 130 countries
  • Statista - gathers data from around the world and also provides the original source from which the statistics were obtained.

Primary documents databases for historical research

Search these databases for the fulltext of newspapers, magazines, journals, manuscripts, and more

  • AM explorer - Search for primary source material covering the social sciences and humanities from multiple Adam Matthew Digital databases. Includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, photographs and archival documents covering history, literature, culture and politics.
  • Gale Primary Sources - Search across multiple Gale collections for monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, maps, and other primary sources.
  • Periodicals Archive Online - Full-text of hundreds of historically significant academic journals mainly in the humanities and social sciences from the early 1800s onwards. Note that current articles or journals are not included in this collection.
  • ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Historical full page and article images from the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times Colonist, the Province, the Vancouver Sun, and the Washington Post from the mid to late 19th century with embargoes for the last 3 to 18 years depending on the newspaper.

Find books in the Library

How to use the Library Catalogue  [guide]

Search by topic, using Basic or Advanced Search.  For known items it is best to use "Browse by title" search.

Try searching by keywords and then limit by "Subject" (left-hand column) and "Resource type" of "books":

Examples:

Try searches such as:

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

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Selected books:

Browse subject headings for books

Browse by Subject    (change the default "title" to "subject").  Browse by Subject will only result in books, not book chapters or journal articles.

Government documents

Canada

United States

International

Searching using Google

Search Tips for Google and Google Scholar

Search results limited to words in the title of document, using "intitle:".  Use capital "OR" for synonyms. Put braces "(__ OR__ )" around words with the same meaning (synonyms). "AND" is assumed by Google so you don't need to include it in your search strategy.

E.g.

(covid-19 OR coronavirus OR pandemic) (race OR racial OR ethnic* OR class OR gender OR "visible minorit*")

Refine your searches

Search for documents from a particular country's domain.  Web country codes

Library guides