Databases

The OECD iLibrary provides online access to all books published by the OECD, including those of the International Energy Agency, the Nuclear Energy Agency, and the European Conference of Ministers of Transport. Currently, between 150 and 200 books are published each year. The subscription includes access to publications going back to 1998.

OECD (including NEA and IEA) publishes fourteen journals and newsletters, and ten statistical periodicals. Each is available in printed form and online.

The OECD iLibrary is the full-text online publications portal of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. McMaster University Libraries subscribe to all three components of the iLibrary - Books, Periodicals and Statistics. Contains international publications and statistics on a wide variety of subjects including agriculture, business, development, economics, education, employment, finance, investment, migration, science, technology, telecommunications and trade. The statistical databases allow you to build your own tables and have them exported to Excel, Beyond 20/20 and other formats.

The Official Document System (ODS) is an online database of UN documents that was first launched in 1993 and updated in 2016. ODS has full-text, born-digital UN documents published from 1993 onward, including documents of the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and their subsidiaries, as well as administrative issuances and other documents. The database also includes scanned documents published between 1946 and 1993, including all resolutions of the principal organs, all documents of the Security Council and the General Assembly Official Records. Documents are available in the official languages of the UN; some documents are also available in German.

Free online dictionary that describes the origins of English-language words.

Indexes over 4 million graduate-level electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) freely available from over 1,100 institutions worldwide.

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 a searchable index of policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications and working papers. It collects data from 188 countries and over a thousand sources worldwide with more being regularly. Each document is parsed, finding references, people and key concepts, and then they are linked to the relevant news stories, academic research, think tank output and other policy. The product allows you to search these documents and see where your ideas, papers, reports and staff are being cited or mentioned. It can help you to discover where your work may be influencing or changing practice in the real world.

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.

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.

Indexes 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.

Includes the backfile of Rolling Stone, one of the most influential consumer magazines of the 20th-21st centuries, spanning music, politics, society, entertainment, film, and popular culture. Coverage is from its launch in 1967, with ongoing addition of new issues.

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.