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Global Crisis of Malaria: Finding resources at Yale

Guide for Frank Snowden's Global Crisis of Malaria class

MALARIA HISTORY

Research using Yale's libraries and resources

Putting together a list of books and journal articles on a subject usually starts with a book recommendation from a professor, a syllabus, searching amazon.com and Google, or talking with friends. All of this is fine, but there are systematic things you can do to supplement this process. To start, you can build a secondary reading list by looking at the footnotes, bibliographies, and reference lists of books and dissertations.

David Gary, Kaplanoff Librarian for American History, has put together a helpful presentation on "The Basics of Writing a History Paper..." with great suggestions.

Look at subject guides, just like this one, on the topic you are researching.  Manuscripts and Archives has a great guide on resources Yale owns on Contemporary Medical Care and Health Policy.

Use Quicksearch, Yale Library's massive search interface, or Orbis, Yale's library catalog, to find books, journals, and other materials.  For example, if you are looking for a history of malaria, use keywords like "quinine," "intermittent fever," etc. Or, do a subject browse by selecting "Subject Browse" in the drop-down box next to the search. 

Worldcat is one of the most complete sources for finding collections around the world. This catalog of catalogs is built from the records of many libraries, so use this to find books, papers, dissertations, online resources, and other materials, especially if you are having difficulty locating materials in Orbis.  If Yale doesn't own the book, use Borrow Direct, which delivers books from Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and other universities within 3-4 days.

More broadly, search for scholarly journal articles on your topic, using databases like JSTOR and America: History & Life (EBSCO).  You probably already use JSTOR, a popular database that provides full-text access to hundreds of important journals in an easy-to-use interface. In some cases, JSTOR is out-of-date, by an average of five years.  To get around this limitation, search America History and Life.  Not only is it up-to-date, but unlike JSTOR it indexes books and dissertations in addition to journals.  For history outside the Unites States, take a look at Historical Abstracts. America: History and Life covers 1,800 academic journals in Amerian and Canadaian history.  Historical Abstracts covers 2,600 academic journals on the rest of the world.  Americanists should search both because of the transnational nature of so many studies in history today.  For History of Medicine, you need to search History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.  HSTM indexes journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book chapters, book reviews and dissertations in the history of science, medicine, and technology and allied historical fields. It draws from bibliographies from major journals, such as Isis, Technology and Culture, etc.   ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global, which has records of 3 million dissertations with 1 million of them available as full text documents.  These bibliographies are usually very detailed and great for discovering primary and secondary resources.  And finally, search Project Muse, which has a variety of scholarly articles in the humanities and social sciences. If you want to expand your search more broadly, Academic Search is a larger database that goes through a number of current periodicals, scholarly, popular and trade.  Articles+ will lead you to a variety of articles and newspapers on your topic, past and present (think of this like Google Scholar, except better connected to Yale!) 

 

Primary sources at Yale

Yale has a wealth of interesting collections.  If you want to look at the papers of inviduals or groups involved in malaria research, use Orbis or the Yale Finding Aid Database for detailed lists of these collections.

Make sure to look for primary sources in newspapers and journals that Yale owns and/or subscribes to.  You can search using Articles+, which also has a separate search for newspapers.  Or go into "Find Databases by Title" and search the term newspapers or periodicals (for journals), to see what databases Yale has to use.  For medical research, make sure to use PubMed, a major resource put out by the government.

Yale also contributes to these collections:

HathiTrust
Works in nearly every subject, including medicine. Includes many works in full text (published before 1923).

Medical Heritage Library (via Internet Archive)
Internet Archive is a large online collection encompassing videos, audio, books, pamphlets, journals, and more.