RétroNews
RétroNews (1631-1951) is the platform of the French national library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) housing digitised historical printed press materials and offers a vast online archive of French and francophone periodicals. The collection features over 2000 newspapers, journals, magazines and reviews published over three centuries, including both important dailies - Le Petit Parisien, Le Journal, Le Matin - but also a variety of periodicals across the political spectrum, together with regional publications and satirical magazines. Full title listings are readily available. The collection is dynamic, increasing monthly to provide a large plurality of sources covering all of France, including its former territories, from the first newspapers up until the 20th century.
The lengthy duration of coverage (1631-1951) and its comprehensive nature - extending to the incorporation of the original images accompanying reviews - means that the database is particularly useful for scholars in tracing historical developments and their reception in fields as diverse as history, political science, communication, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc. In addition, RétroNews offers introductory notes on its periodicals, daily editorial content and advanced search capabilities, with particular efforts made to ensure accessibility for a non-specialist audience. This includes the creation of broad thematic strands and pairing historical sources with contemporary content such as videos and podcasts which help to explain the primary source materials and unlock a rich cultural heritage brought forth through the mediatization of historic periodicals.
Provision is also made for term frequency searches to understand how a person, concept, event, or organization was covered in the media over a desired time-period or across different publications. This, together with the facility to bulk download text files, is of benefit to researchers in digital humanities.
Databases provide access to high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, dissertations and other sources.
These databases have been especially chosen for this subject area.
When carrying out your research for a piece of work, you will need to search more than one database to find all of the journal articles relevant to your topic, as each database covers different journals.
The library provides comprehensive access to a vast archive of British and overseas newspapers, including electronic access to many current publications. Newspapers are an excellent primary source research tool, not only providing reports about events and issues but also editorials and letters that can be extremely useful for deeper understanding. Access the Newspaper guide for further information.
The latest acquisition to our newspaper databases. Users can study the progression of issues over time by browsing issues extending from the newspaper’s first publication in May 1827 to effectively the present day (within 1 week), including articles, photos, advertisements, classified ads, obituaries, cartoons, and more. Searching facilitated by user-friendly support and indexing tools, with hit-term highlighting, searchable PDFs, and image downloads in PDF format.
Getting started with subject databases
This resource explores some of the key features of subject databases, demonstrating that while they can initially appear daunting and complicated, they can be as easy to use as any online shopping site
View all workshops and online resources in this area on the
My Learning Essentials webpages.
Grey literature refers to research that is either unpublished or has been published in non-commercial form. The term includes the following types of information:
The British Library reports, Conferences and Theses can be searched for through the British Library Integrated Catalogue.
Use these p tags if you need multiple paragraphs
The Conference Proceedings Citation Index Literature via Web of Science is taken from the most significant conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions worldwide. Available in two editions: Sciences & Technology and Social Science Literature from the most significant conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions worldwide. Available in two editions: Sciences & Technology and Social Science.
Google Scholar provides a quick way to search for scholarly literature across disciplines and sources. You can find articles, theses, books, abstracts and grey literature from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other sources.
Grey Net provides information about grey literature. GreySource Index provides a list of web-based grey literature resources.
MIAR is a matrix of data from more than 100 international indexing and abstracting databases (citation, multidisciplinary or specialised databases) and journal repertoires, which is developed with the purpose of providing useful information for the identification of scientific journals and the analysis of their diffusion. The system works through the elaboration of a correspondence matrix between the journals, identified by their ISSN, and the databases and directories that index or include them.
MIAR has more than 48,000 journal records, but a search in MIAR using a valid ISSN number will return information on the diffusion of any journal in the world at the sources analysed by MIAR, whether or not it has its own record in MIAR.
MIAR 2023 live. Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals.
OpenGrey is a multidisciplinary European resource which provides open access to 700,000 bibliographical references of grey literature produced in Europe. It covers science, technology, biomedical science, economics, social science and humanities.
Examples of grey literature include technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, conference papers and official publications.
Science.gov searches over 55 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 15 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results. Science.gov is governed by the interagency Science.gov Alliance.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.
Scopus is a user-friendly database covering some 12,000 journals from all aspects of science, technology and medicine, with some quite sophisticated features.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.