Library Guides: Asian Studies: Introduction

Introduction

Welcome to the Asian Studies Subject Research Guide

Your subject librarians have designed this guide to highlight online resources at the University of Melbourne Library relevant to the Asian Studies major and its elective subjects.

This guide is intended to be a starting point for your research. For a more comprehensive list of Library resources for this subject please visit the A-Z eJournals and Databases website.

Quick start

Five things you can do to start your research in Asian Studies:

Note: The buttons below will open resources in new windows.

1. New to the University of Melbourne? Visit the New Users' Library Guide

2. Build your subject knowledge with the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History

3. Develop your research skills with this video (2:10 mins)

4. Search for a book on your topic in the Library Catalogue

5. Search for a journal article in JSTOR

Encyclopedias

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History by David Ludden
ISBN: 9780190277727
Publication Date: 2015

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

Databases

Core Arts and Humanities databases (try these first):

The databases below are multidisciplinary so you can expect lots of 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. We highly recommend searching in at least one other database on this list as well as Discovery.
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.
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.
ProQuest Ebook Central
Ebook Central is a little different to other large, multidisciplinary databases - it contains only full-text ebooks. It has a huge range of material, including a a vast amount of arts and humanities content (over 21000 books on History alone), which makes it perfect for finding in-depth, university-level book chapters .

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

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 on the 4th floor of the Eastern Resource Centre (ERC) Library.

Tips on finding books in the Library Catalogue

To find books on a particular subject, use a keyword search on the Library Catalogue. For example:

Human rights

Asia cinema

transgender

democratization

Keyword searching often retrieves a large number of results. These four techniques can help you focus your search:

AND

Narrows your search

E.g. Asia AND cinema

Expands your search

E.g. transgender OR LGBT

" "

Searches for an exact phrase

E.g. "human rights"

searches for variant endings

E.g. democra* = democracy, democratize, democatic

The video below (3:47 mins) explains how you can use these advanced search techniques to quickly find relevant books and ebooks in the catalogue:

Screenshot of how to use subject headings in the library catalogue

Looking for a book we don't have or is not on our shelves?

Request books from other universities through the BONUS+ catalogue and collect them from any Unimelb branch library.

Visit the BONUS+ webpage for more info.

Inter-Library Loans

University of Melbourne staff and students can request resources through the Library’s Inter-Library Loans service. For more information visit the ILL web page, or you can access the request forms.

A CAVAL card allows you to borrow from other universities and TAFEs. Visit the CAVAL website to find out how to sign up for a CAVAL card.

You can then use the Trove website to see which library has the book you want.

Newspapers

For more information about finding news, click on the button below (this will open in a new window).

Visit the News and Newspapers Library Guide

Country information

For more information about finding country information, click on the button below (this will open in a new window).

Visit the Company, Industry & Country Information Library Guide

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.