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Journalism & New Media Resources @ UTSC

A guide to assist UTSC students in Journalism and New Media find resources needed to successfully complete their course work.

Journalism, Media, and Political & Social Issues

In Media Studies and Journalism, we're often dealing with broad interdisciplinary topics, such as the political importance of a free press in a democratic society, or the global corporatization of the music industry.  These topics will be studied by a variety of different scholars who focus on different academic disciplines.  

When researching your topic, consider first, "what type of scholar would be most likely to write about these issues?".  For example, if your topic is largely political in nature, begin your searching in one of the Political Science databases that U of T subscribes to.  If you're writing about the history of communications technologies, consider starting in a major History database.

For many topics, databases focusing on either Political Science or Sociology will likely be a good starting point, and the boxes below provide more information on a variety of these resources.

Find Articles on Social Issues, Cultures and Societies

Sociology-specific databases, such as the ones below, are a great way of finding articles that deal with cultural and societal comparisons (globalization, developed vs. developing nations, how societies different societies interact with media and technology). Once again, you could also try multidisciplinary databases such as SummonJSTOR or Scopus.

Sociological Abstracts

Social Sciences Abstracts

International Bibliography of Social Sciences (IBSS)

  • main focus: sociology, political science, anthropology and economics
  • 70% English language with translations available
  • more information

More sociology databases