Worldwide Political Science Abstracts provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, public administration, and social policy. Worldwide Political Science Abstracts is updated monthly, and coverage begins in 1975 based on "Political Science Abstracts, and including "ABC POL SCI."

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students at this web addresses:

http://eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-wpsabs.cgi

Searching

The truncation symbol in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts is an asterisk (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command terror* will search for the words terror, terrors, terrorism, terrorist, terroristic.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(terror* or sabot*) and (policy or policies)

The first part of this statement will find material about terrorism or terrorist or saboteur or saboteurs. The second part will look for the words "policy" or "policies". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for polices dealing with terrorist and sabotage issues.

John Dillard, Social Sciences Librarian
dillard@uta.edu
cell: (817) 675-8962 - - office: (817) 272-7518