POLI 122: Politics of Human Rights (Spring 2023): Home

This guide is designed to help you navigate Library-licensed and open access research sources beyond what you might easily find in UC Library Search.

Use the front page to find quick links to frequently requested resources and tools.
Explore the tabs on the left to find curated links to specialized resources for different subfields, methodologies, and research questions.

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Workbook: Step by Step Research Plan for POLI 122

Best Bets

UC Library Search - search all of the UC's library collections
UC Library Search allows you to search all of the University of California's library collections. It includes scholarly and peer-reviewed journals and articles, books and ebooks, course reserves, special formats (media, maps, newspapers, dissertations, etc.), government documents and datasets and primary resources, archives, and special collections

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
1975-present. Research within the political science discipline and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration/policy. Use the Get it at UC button to find full text, print, and/or request the item from another library.
ProQuest - All Databases
Select and search across multiple databases we license from ProQuest. Most of these databases index--and in some cases provide full text access--of journals in all subject areas, along with indexing books, book chapters, dissertations and other sources. You can also add some non-journal databases to your search, like Dissertations & Theses and several major newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc). However, a few ProQuest products, such as Congressional, Statistical Abstracts of the World, and Statistical Insight, are not included here and must be searched separately.
EBSCO - All Databases
Select and search across multiple databases we license from EBSCO, including Academic Search Complete. These databases index journals and magazines--and in many cases provide full text access--in all subject areas in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and science and engineering. Additional sources like newspapers, books and book chapters are also indexed in some of these databases.
Access World News
Dates vary, but some historical coverage as far back as 1690. More than 5000 sources worldwide, including nearly 1500 in the U.S. Many historical newspapers are in digitized image form. Largely newspapers, with newswires, transcripts, newsletters, magazines, videos.
Nexis Uni
Nexis Uni contains thousands of full-text sources including newspapers, wires, transcripts, newsletters, magazines, trade journals; also industry news, company information, law reviews, court decisions, statutes. Coverage dates vary. International and U.S. sources.

Key Human Rights Documents

Human Rights Library - University of Minnesota
*The* site to begin human rights research. Comprehensive site includes full-text documents, treaties, international agreements, and more.
Human Rights - United Nations Documentation: Research Guide
Research guide to UN materials dealing with human rights, with links to full text when available.
Council of Europe Human Rights and Rule of Law
Contains news and full-text legal documents
OHCHR Jurisprudence
This database provides easy access to jurisprudence emanating from the United Nations Treaty Bodies which receive and consider complaints from individuals: the Human Rights Committee (CCPR), the Committee against Torture (CAT), the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
Project Diana: Human Rights Cases (Project Avalon)
Contains articles, documents, and links to resources in a variety of subject areas
Human Rights Texts: Converting Human Rights Primary Source Documents into Data
Replication data for Fariss CJ, Linder FJ, Jones ZM, Crabtree CD, Biek MA, Ross A-SM, et al. (2015) Human Rights Texts: Converting Human Rights Primary Source Documents into Data. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0138935. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0138935. Corpus of over 14,000 reports and documents from human rights organizations.

Visual History Archive (VHA)
USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive allows users to search through and view more than 54,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide.

Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1983, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and anti-Rohingya mass violence. It also includes testimonies about contemporary acts of violence against Jews. . Individual Registration required.

Human Rights News

A useful way to find a human rights or migration topic to research is to choose a current event. Some ideas for sources:

Human Rights Watch News Feed

Google Custom Search Engines for Finding Government and Nongovernmental Publications

►Search tip: If you get too many results, try adding one of these words to your search terms:

"policy surveillance"
"policy tracker"
"policy brief"
"issue brief"
"bill analysis"
report
strategy
plan
statistics
directory
Geographic or administrative divisions - California, San Diego, etc.

►Bonus search tip: Google-powered searches can be limited to pages published during a specific timeframe by using before:[date] and/or after:[date]

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