Library Guides: Asian Studies: Introduction

Introduction

This subject guide highlights some key discipline resources to get you started with study and research.

Refer to the New Students Library Guide for everything you need to know about Library services and resources.
Build your researching, reading and writing skills with the Research Essentials Library Guide.
Streamline your access to online resources with the Library's quick access tools.

Encyclopedias

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History by David Ludden
Publication Date: 2015
Substantive, peer-reviewed, and regularly updated, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History combines the speed and flexibility of digital with the rigorous standards of academic publishing.

Routledge handbooks
Peer-reviewed, high quality handbooks which provide a definitive overview of a whole subject area or sub-discipline.

Databases and journals

Use databases to search across many academic resources (including peer-reviewed journals) at the same time.

Refer to the A-Z Ejournals and Databases page for a comprehensive list of available resources.

Core Arts and Humanities databases:

The selection of multidisciplinary databases below will retrieve results from different subject areas.

Discovery (EBSCO)
Use Discovery to look for books, ebooks, journal articles and more. It's a great place to start your search but does not give you everything the Library has.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is one of the most popular ways to find academic sources for study and research. Did you know you can use it to search for journal articles that the University of Melbourne has access to? You can do this through the link above or set up your Google Scholar preferences to include Library content.
JSTOR
JSTOR is one of the largest databases the Library has access to. It is a multidisciplinary database so it looks in thousands of journals in over a hundred subjects - many of them related to arts and humanities. Highly recommended as your first or second place to search.
ProQuest Central
Covering more than 160 subjects areas, ProQuest Central is the largest aggregated database of periodical content. This award-winning online reference resource features a highly-respected, diversified mix of content including scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, books, newspapers, reports and videos.
Scopus (Elsevier)
Scopus is another large, multidisciplinary database. It looks through journals, books, and conference papers. It has some advanced tools that can help you discover new research quickly - the 'times cited' and 'related articles' links are great time-savers. While it doesn't always have full-text PDFs it is still an excellent place to look for your research.
Web of Science
Web of Science is a massive, multidisciplinary database which includes a large amount of humanities and social sciences material from as far back as 1900. Like Scopus it has some advanced features that allows you to quickly link to related research.

Asian Studies-specific databases:

For more focused results try searching in one of these subject-specific databases.

Bibliography of Asian Studies
This on-line version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains records on all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.
CiNii Articles (CiNii)
Search information on Japanese academic articles published in academic society journals, university research bulletins or articles included in the National Diet Library's Japanese Periodicals Index Database.
DBpia Electronic Journals Service
Over 1,000 Korean scholarly journals. the journal titles are arranged by 11 subject categories (Business/Economics, Theology, Education, Sociology, Natural Science, Human science, Linguistics, Law/Administration, Artistic and Physical).
China Academic Journals full-text database
One of the most comprehensive Chinese academic journals worldwide, with more than 9,000 journals and covering all subject areas.
BIPE - Bibliography of Indonesian politics and the economy (Informit)
The Bibliography of Indonesian Politics and the Economy (BIPE) is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts items on Indonesian politics, government, economy, political culture and demography. Please note BIPE is no longer updated.
Singapore Malaysia Collection (Informit)
Produced by the National University of Singapore Library, this database contains resources on the development of the Malay States, Singapore and the Bornean regions from founding through to the colonial period and independence. It covers the period from 1900 to September 2007.

Other useful databases:

Taylor & Francis Journals
Content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Science and Technology and contains over 1600 journal titles.
Cambridge Core Journals
Cambridge University Press currently publishes over 300 peer-reviewed academic journals for the global market. Cambridge Journals Online contain the latest research from a broad sweep of subject areas. From September 2016 titles are available via the Cambridge Core platform alongside Cambridge Books, Histories and Companions.
Oxford Journals
Oxford Journals includes current content from all subject areas, the Oxford Journal Archive content going back 140 years and the ‘Oxford Open’ initiative which includes over 100 open access journals.
Index Islamicus
Indexes literature on Islam and the Muslim world, covering Middle East and other main Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, plus Muslim minorities elsewhere. Over 3,000 journals are included, together with conference proceedings, monographs, multi-authored works and book reviews.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global
This database is the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day and offering full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997.

Books

You can access print and eBooks via the Library Catalogue. To find books on a particular subject, try a keyword search:

To improve your searching skills, see the Research Essentials Library Guide. Note that you can search the catalogue in non-Latin scripts (including Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean).

For information on access and loans, including material from other libraries, see the borrowing from the library page. The eBook Guide provides information on eBook access.

Books in the East Asian Collection

East Asian Collection consists of both print and electronic research materials in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. This collection mainly covers the areas of arts and humanities, social sciences and architectural history. Print materials are kept in the Eastern Resource Centre (ERC) Library.

Streaming videos and media

Kanopy (Kanopy)
Over 20,000 online educational videos from across the world, covering a wide range of disciplines including history and social studies. Also offers a large range of Australian content and videos can be searched using the library catalogue.
EduTV (Informit)
EduTV is a Video Streaming service of over 50,000+ broadcast programs from free-to-air (ABC, SBS, NITV, 9, 7, 10, etc.) and pay TV channels in Australia from 2006 onward.
Alexander Street Video
Access to thousands of full-length streaming video titles.
Socialism on Film : The Cold War and International Propaganda
This film documents the communist world from the Russian Revolution until the 1980s, including significant groupings of material on Vietnam, China, Korea, and more. The Library has access to Module 1 : Wars and Revolutions.
Visual History Archive Online
Over 52,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide, including testimonies from the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China. Log-in via the Library then follow the link on the database home page to Register and use the database.