Databases

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of the Ottawa Citizen from 1845 to 2010.

The most current issues of Ottawa Citizen are available online (plain-text) via Factiva

Overton is the largest index of global policy documents, linking them to research, news, and think tank outputs. It helps authors track where their work is cited and how it influences real-world policy and practice.

A collection of 55,000 specially written biographies, which describe the lives of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond. The Oxford DNB replaces and extends the original Victorian DNB, and includes: re-written biographies of all subjects included in the Victorian DNB, reflecting new research, and providing an up-to-date assessment of their lives 16,500 biographies of new subjects from all periods. For checking facts, learning about people involved in a historical event or associated with a place, or undertaking new research into any aspect of the British past. Entries offer detailed and extensive biographical information drawn from primary and secondary sources and range from a few dozen to 35,000 words in length. With more than 10,000 illustrations, researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Oxford DNB is also the largest selection of national portraiture ever published.

Widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language, the OED is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world. It includes present-day meanings, along with the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

Provides scholarly review articles summarizing current thinking and research in a range of subjects across the humanaities, social sciences, and sciences.  Each handbook offers in-depth introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current state of scholarship.  McMaster's access has expanded to include all 1200 Handbooks.

Covers issues in the public debate through selective coverage of a wide variety of international sources including journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, web content, and more. 

Includes digitized New Zealand  and Pacific newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries.  

An index to papers presented at worldwide meetings, conferences, expositions, workshops, congresses, and symposia received at the British Library Document Supply Centre.

Major online periodical archive that makes the backfiles of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences available electronically. PAO contains over 700 journals spanning more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages. McMaster's subscription includes PAO collections 1-10.

Discover published policy reports from leading government, think tanks, and other non-government organizations. View cited references and navigate to research publications used to formulate public policy recommendations. 

• Refine and analyze results to discover policy trends.
• Discover research used to formulate policy.

Produced by Coherent Digital, Policy Commons is the world’s largest database for public policy, with more than 3.2 million reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources, and media drawn from a directory of more than 24,000 IGOs, NGOs, think tanks, and research centers. It includes over a million pages of premium content from leading publishers and restored from organizations that have disappeared.

The Policy Commons interface offers fulltext searching in addition to 3,400 topics tags and filters for document type, organization name and type, publication language, country of publication, and publication date. It also provides a searchable database of more than 16,000 policy organizations worldwide.

Provides simultaneous access to the databases PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) Index, Policy File Index, Political Science Database and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, covering the international literature in political science and public administration/policy, along with related fields. Together, they provide abstracts, indexing and full text coverage of journal articles, country reports, dissertations, think-tank reports, working papers, government documents and more, including full-text from many leading political science and international relations journals.

Provides nearly two million preprints from arXiv, bioRxiv, chemRxiv, medRxiv and Preprints.org and is accessible via the Web of Science platform. 

Discover preprints for key research articles ahead of the formal publication in a journal from a range of international selected and evaluated preprint repositories in the sciences, social sciences and arts & humanities

• Discover preprints connected to author profiles and peer reviewed literature in the Web of Science.
• Link directly to the preprint repositories to view each version of the preprint and download full text.
• Track citation activity for the preprint and link to the citation network in Web of Science.

An index of conference publications from worldwide meetings, conferences, expositions, workshops, congresses, and symposia. Provides an overview of the event's activities by listing the papers presented.

A collection of over 670 full-text scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Individual journal titles are accessible through the library catalogue (Omni).

Cross-search over 50 indexing, abstracting, and full-text databases in a range of subjects.

Covers over 4 million doctoral dissertations and master's theses completed at colleges and universities worldwide.

Contains thousands of full-text e-books across a variety of disciplines. To display titles accessible to McMaster users, use the "Book Status" filter and select "Owned and subscribed to by my library."  

Individual titles are also listed in McMaster's library catalogue and in the standard ProQuest databases platform.

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of several Canadian, British, French, Indian and U.S. newspapers including The Globe and Mail, The Hamilton Spectator, Le Monde, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer, The Times of India, Toronto Star and The Wall Street Journal.

Multidisciplinary database that brings together or links to full-text for publicly available scholarly content from a number of different sources from around the world. It includes content from major subject repositories such as arXiv as well as open access journals. Content includes journal articles, pre-prints, dissertations, conference papers and reports.

Sabinet African Journals encompasses the breadth and depth of African research content by offering the most comprehensive, searchable collection of full-text African electronic journals available on one platform. Over 600 journal titles in 10 collections are available, including African Journal Archive, Business & Finance, Education, Juta's Law Journals, Labour, Law, Medicine & Health, Religion, Science Technology & Agriculture, and Social Sicences & Humanities. 

African government & law plus news resources, also curated by Sabinet, are available on Sabinet Discover. 

SAGE Journals has a portfolio that includes more than 1,100 journals, spanning the humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. McMaster offers access to the full collection.

For open access (OA) publishing considerations, authors affiliated with McMaster can now publish in over 900 SAGE Choice journals with no article processing charges (APCs), and may receive a 40% discount on publication in SAGE’s Gold open access titles, with a small number of titles excluded. Please visit Library Support for Open Access for more information. 

Contains information on the full range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods for the social and behavioral sciences, as well as many methods commonly used in the hard sciences, pulled from over 750 handbooks, encyclopedias, and journal articles. Supports researchers in every step of a research project, from writing a research question, choosing a method, gathering and analyzing data, to writing up and publishing the findings.

Learn about research methods and research design through stories from researchers in the field and their critique of their own research articles.  McMaster has purchased Cases collections 1 and 2, and 'Diversifying and Decolonizing Research'.

Learn to master quantitative and qualitative data analysis with step-by-step guides and sample data.

Supports users in conducting research that is both critical and inclusive, by showcasing a diverse range of experiences and approaches from marginalized, under-represented, underserved, and vulnerable communities,  as well as decolonial perspectives that challenge traditional research paradigms.

Read bite-sized introductions to hundreds of research concepts and methods written by global experts.

The Scholars GeoPortal is a geospatial data platform providing access to large-scale GIS datasets and over 3 million Ontario aerial images and orthophotos. It offers powerful search, visualization, and mapping tools that allow users to view, analyze, and download data. Content includes land-based vector data (e.g., soil, water, cultural features), provincial and municipal data, census geography, and licensed datasets from Ontario academic libraries. The platform also features enhanced open data and historical digitized maps, including topographic maps from OCUL map collections and collaborative mapping projects.

Full-text for over 160,000 e-books from commercial publishers, including titles from Springer, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, and the Gibson Canadian publishers collection.  Also includes approximately 400,000 e-books that are open access or public domain titles.

Contains over 70 million articles from over 28,000 full text journals covering every academic discipline.