POLI 366

POLI 366 Politics of Africa Library Workshop Slides 

Sofia Discovery Search - to find ebooks, print books, government publications and some journal articles at Concordia Library

Political Science Complete - full-text Political Science journal article database, with an excellent thesaurus

Academic Search Complete - multidisciplinary database, with news and scholarly journal articles

Google Scholar - Google's academic database, use on campus or set-up library links for use off campus, to access Concordia resrouces

• How to set up Google Scholar to find Concordia Resources

The 7 step process to determine blinded peer review and open access journal reliability

Follow these steps to determine if the journal articles you find are reliable and appropriate to use for your assignment.

Non-Academic Sources: Country reports, News articles, NGO reports

Country Profiles 

Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) - find country profiles, political structures, election and economic information.

The World Bank:

• African Countries: Mainly economic information with some demographic and social statistics.
• Countries and Economies - Data

HeinOnline World Constitutions Illustrated: Contemporary & Historical Documents & Resources: Contains the current constitution of every country in the world in its original language along with at least one English translation.

News Databases

International Newsstream - news content from outside the U.S. and Canada, in multiple languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Danish, See the Title List.

US Newsstream - Major US daily newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall street journal, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, USA Tody and many more regional and local newspapers.

• How do I spot fake news? - University of Toronto Libraries guide
• FactCheck.org: monitors the accuracy of U.S. political stories.
• PolitiFact: verifies political news stories.
• Snopes: fact-checks Internet rumours and stories.
• Civic Online Reasoning (from Stanford Education Group): produces research reports, lessons, and videos focused on evaluating online content. 
• Duke Reporters' Lab Fact-Checking: maintains a database of global fact-checking sites.

Government Information and NGO Sources

IGO Government information search - choose intergovernmental organizations from the drop down menu

Africa Portal: Publications - policy research from non-governmental think-tanks (Archival up to June 2022)

IDEA - Africa - intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide

Afrobarometer - African public attitude surveys on democracy and governance, non-partisan

Transparency International - reports, statistics, and analysis of global corruption.

Freedom House: Freedom in the World reports - comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties.

Electoral Integrity Project -  the Electoral Integrity Project produces innovative and policy-relevant research comparing elections worldwide.

Advanced Google Search - use the Domain (examples: .gov.za or .go.ug) to narrow down to government websites only

Citation Resources

• Chicago style guide - guidelines and examples prepared by Concordia Library

• Chicago Manual of Style (full text online version) (access restricted to Concordia students)

• Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide: Author-Date (Chicago Manual of Style)