Contact info

You can contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Sociology / Anthropology (moninder_lalli@sfu.ca) for assistance via email or via Ask a librarian.

Research process

Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process, or in other words how to find materials for your essay.

Selected reference works

Encyclopedias, handbooks or textbooks provide overviews, definitions and identify key authors and ideas.

Find journal articles using databases

Searching the "Databases for a discipline" is a great strategy to view articles that have been written within the scholarly journals of that discipline. For help, refer to the How to find journal articles, What is a scholarly journal?, and Finding articles: Advanced search techniques [video 3:13 mins]

If full-text of article is not available from within the database, click on the "Get@SFU" link to find it or to initiate an inter-library loan request.

ProQuest Sociology Collection - for issues related to class, gender, racism, sexuality and sexism and theoretical and applied sociology, social science, and policy science.
Anthropology Plus — Key database for Anthropological journal articles
Social Sciences Full Text Access to a wide assortment of the most important English-language social science journals
CBCA Complete Canada's reference and current events - scholarly journal articles, trade publications, dissertations, books, newspapers and magazines
Environment Complete -- Comprehensive coverage (over 1,900 journals) in environmental and many related disciplines. Also available is fulltext access to over 200 monographs.
Canada Commons (formerly, Canadian Electronic Library from desLibris) - for public policy documents from Canadian institutes, think-tanks and research groups.

Find books

The Library Catalogue provides access to books, journal articles, videos, government documents and much more. To limit the search results to "books", use the filter (left-hand column in search results) to "resource type" of "books."

Library Catalogue search guide

Search the SFU Library Catalogue, using either the Basic or the Advanced search

Note: In the searches below, search results have been limited by "Resource type" of "Books" and selected "Subjects"

Proper syntax for Boolean logic (words that allow you to combine concepts)

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")