Guides & Bibliographies

Sociological Abstracts

Introduction

Sociological Abstracts (SocAbs) provides citations and abstracts on all aspects of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Sociological Abstracts covers an international selection of more than 1,800 journals. Some other formats of information that are also covered are conference papers, books, and dissertations dating back to 1952. Here is a sampling of subject matter and topics that are covered: community development, social structure, demography, social psychology, group interactions, urban studies, and women's studies. SocAbs (Sociological Abstracts) is updated monthly, and contains more the 680,000 records.

Sociological Abstracts is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students at this web addresses:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-socioabscsa.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in Sociological 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 soci* will search for both the word social, sociology, sociological, sociologist, socioeconomic, sociocultural, and sociolinguistics.

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:

(child* or adoles* or teen* or juven*) and (policy or policies)

The first part of this statement will find material about children or adolescents, teens or juveniles. 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 children's issues.

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