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CSP 54
Democratizing Mexico [Trevizo]

Information Found Here!

Starters 
Books
Articles
Websites
More Help
 Topic Starters and Idea Generators
Encyclopedias and other types of reference sources are useful for answering questions. They offer convenient overviews to your topic, timelines, background and other information, often with bibliographic citations providing additional sources for your topic. 

Go to our Reference Shelves and browse around the call numbers JL 1200 to JL 1299 [Political Institutions and Public Administration - Mexico]. Below are some specific reference sources you may find helpful:

Encyclopedia of Mexico : History, Society & Culture  
Encyclopedia of Latin American Politics
Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture

The following reference sources are older but may still be relevant for a historical perspective on Mexican political institutions.

Political Parties of the Americas : Canada, Latin America, and the West Indies
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean  

Books: OASys and LINK+
OASys is Oxy's Catalog, which lists books, journals, online resources, and other library holdings. The LINK+  catalog combines the holdings of over 30 participating libraries.

To get started, you might try a keyword search in OASys. Be sure to notice the subject headings for the best items on your topic. Click on those headings to get more resources. Need more? Click over to LINK+ and continue your searching there. Need even more? WorldCat includes over 54 million entries from more than 45,000 libraries. You may place Interlibrary Loan requests. (Slower than LINK+)

Suggested Keyword Searches for this Course

Keywords will differ depending on the focus of your research. Here are some obvious examples.
 

keyword: mexico

keyword: latin america
keyword: polit* AND mexico

Tips:
Remember to be flexible with your terminology and try several different searches.
Use synonyms.
Truncate terms to retrieve records that mention all variations of the word in question.
To narrow search results, limit your search to certain locations [Book Stacks, Special Coll] or to specific Material Types [Elect. Resource, Text (Book)].
Caution: In a library catalog, keywords are usually found in the Notes, Title, and Subject Headings fields. Therefore, keyword searches may produce huge results or results that include the keyword(s) but be irrelevant to your topic.

Suggested Subject Headings for this Course

Mexico
Mexico Political Parties
Mexico -- Politics and government -- 1988-
Partido Accion Nacional Mexico

Advanced searches, combining subject headings with key words or phrases, yield a manageable number of targeted results. Here are a few examples:
[Subject] Mexico AND [Any] Partido**
[Subject] Mexico AND [Any] democracy
[Subject] Mexico AND [Any] polit* Limited to: Year after 2000

For more assistance with searching for books, please see Finding Books.

Articles in Magazines, Newspapers and Journals
Articles provide a variety of information ranging from entertainment to scholarly research. To search for articles you use indexes or databases that may include more than one type of article.  Learn how to recognize and distinguish between the different types of publications (academic, popular, etc.) and select the articles that fit your need the best.
For clues to identifying various citations, click here 

Selected Library Research Databases for CSP 54: 

Historical Abstracts
Index to books, articles, and other materials in world history from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada).

PAIS International (CSA)
Public Affairs Information Service index of articles, books, conference proceedings, government documents, book chapters, and statistical directories covering contemporary social, economic, and political issues and the making and evaluating of public policy. Includes the PAIS Archive. Searches find citations to documents originally published and indexed from 1915 to the present. Links to full-text (when available).

ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Search the full text of the New York Times (1851 - 1999) and the Los Angeles Times (1881 - 1985 and growing). View results as page images.

Social Science Citation Index
Fully indexes 1,725 journals across 50 social sciences disciplines, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 3,300 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals.

If you are pursuing a multi-disciplinary approach, be sure to look at the wide range of databases available here at Oxy. DATABASES by Topic.

For more assistance with searching our databases, please see Finding Articles.

Web Sites
Like other information resources, Web sites may include personal opinion, deliberate hoax, credible information and scholarly material. It is very important for you to critically assess the information resource itself, as well as its content.

Some Criteria for Evaluating Information

The National Security Archives [GWU]
 www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

The Mexico Project
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/mexico/

Partido Acción Nacional
www.pan.org.mx/

Political Database of the Americas [Georgetown]
 pdba.georgetown.edu/

CoolWhois.com - Domain search that features historical caching of whois information. If you are unsure of the source of a website, whois searches can provide domain name registration information and other registrant information to help verify the authority of the site.
www.coolwhois.com/

Try a different search engine or a subject directory found on our Public Internet Search Tools page. For example, go to the Librarian's Index to the Internet, and try this search: mexico AND politics.

 For more assistance with searching for web sites, please see Finding Public Web Pages.

Page created by Nick Velkavrh.
Page last edited on 08/25/2008.
Reviewed by Marsha Schnirring on 02/25/2008.

We welcome your Comments and Suggestions.

 

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